CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
Latest editorial
Keith Armstrong - My Father Worked on Ships
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
My Father Worked on Ships
Keith Armstrong
My father worked on ships.
They spelked his hands,
dusted his eyes, his face, his lungs.
Those eyes that watered by the Tyne
stared out to sea
to see the world
in a tear of water, at the drop
of an old cloth cap.
Similar stories
ALAN MORRISON recommends a consummate, heart-warming collection about a working-class upbringing in the industrial north-east
TONY FOX invites readers to come and hear the story of the remarkable Liverpudlian International Brigader Alexander Foote
by Clare Evans
by Widad Nabi