CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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Roy Marshall - Decree no. 2015
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
Decree no. 2015
Roy Marshall
Calm as a mass of Kevlar helmets assembled beneath a flag
or stacked heat-seeking heads awaiting discharge
we shall pursue the following goals;
if deemed applicable, the slowest runner shall be caught,
his or her head, blown off. Monkeys may be mown from trees,
collaterally. A beetle might be all that survives
to crawl through ash on a hospital floor. The street
will be supplied with ignition until it flames, brandy-blue,
the school draped in drifts of smoke that shift
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