CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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Neil Young - Shrapnel
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
Shrapnel
Neil Young
My granny’s elbow defied the Luftwaffe,
caught a spear of molten shrapnel lead
that ricocheted through the front room window
and would’ve struck her cradled Betty’s head
if she had turned that instant to the right.
That night in 1940, streets turned red
with gales of flame. Lord Haw-Haw laughed
there’d been “Easter eggs” dropped on Belfast.
Next day the toll was near nine hundred dead
– and not an anti-aircraft gun in sight;
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