CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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Alan Buckley - Scum, 15/04/89
Well Versed is edited by Jody Porter
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
JAMIE BRITTON recommends this fine analysis of the architectural, ecological and infrastructural destruction of the Gaza Strip
Scum
15/04/89
Alan Buckley
I lay on the turf, under a steely sky.
No one picked my pockets. No one pissed
on me. The copper who gave me the kiss
of life wasn't beaten up. I died,
that's the truth; and though I'd never known
such closeness, our bodies like beans in a can,
when the air was squeezed from me I died alone.
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