CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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Joseph Massey - Nothing More
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
Nothing More
Joseph Massey
Clover mite crushed
under my finger, red
streak dragged over a blank
page, as blank
as the hour, the day,
despite the low hum
in the apartment:
refrigerator motor
kicking on, the old man
across the hall talking
to himself. It isn’t enough
to write into this
vacancy, to say
the day’s blank—
but what else is summer:
what doesn’t heat hollow
and reduce to a streak—
these blown husks
striking pavement,
a wasp trapped
between panes of glass.
Leave the page stained.
A book of stains.
The room dissolving
around a bolt of sun
slashed down the wall.
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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
TONY FOX invites readers to come and hear the story of the remarkable Liverpudlian International Brigader Alexander Foote
by Widad Nabi