CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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Greta Bellamacina - Living room mirror
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
Living room mirror
Greta Bellamacina
Don’t look at yourself like you're a criminal
it's too glamorous, this house is Godless.
Our child hasn’t learnt his knees
or the broken dreams of the Internet.
There is only our unprescipted love, not even a word yet
but for you it’s Modernism.
I have taken out my arms made them into curtains
the same ones you wrote about
tied up with red ribbons before you came and made me a woman.
Before the dream of lying and breaking girls
the same ones, which makes morning night
and pours anonymous creaks.
Retirement seems too cheap now
contact mussels and special love makes me late now
all related, all eternal like the space under our bed
and the creations of the reborn.
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ALAN MORRISON recommends a consummate, heart-warming collection about a working-class upbringing in the industrial north-east
ANDY CROFT welcomes the publication of an anthology of recent poems published by the Morning Star, and hopes it becomes an annual event
RUTH AYLETT reviews two collections of outright political poetry
by Widad Nabi