MARIA DUARTE, FIONA O’CONNOR and ANDY HEDGECOCK review Savage House, Enzo, Madfabulous, and Erupcja
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Jacqueline Saphra - Valentine for Turbulent Times
Well Versed is edited by Jody Porter
CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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
Valentine for Turbulent Times
Jacqueline Saphra
When you open your eyes to find great love
beside you and you tease open the heart
with kisses and coffee and you yawn and yearn
and reach towards this snowdrop morning,
a few lines of bliss might achieve lift-off
but for the cacophonous news that rolls
across your horizon grinning from
its armoured tank as it exits the hatch
to trip you up with its big dirty boots, even
before you have a chance to rise. And love?
There it is, running from fire and terror,
small and useless like the unseasonal
ladybird crawling across this page,
confused about what to do with its wings.
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