MARIA DUARTE, FIONA O’CONNOR and ANDY HEDGECOCK review Savage House, Enzo, Madfabulous, and Erupcja
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Helen Kay - Consultation
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
Consultation
Helen Kay
You have just ten minutes, starting now,
for me to listen tactfully to symptoms
then grasp your real reasons for coming
to ponder twenty pathways for a lump
to touch places, to use Latin-named tools
and explain them, to compose prescriptions
selecting from a hundred brands of drug
to step back from the fact that your growth
may be terminal and you have young kids
to be your soothing medicine, to listen
to care deeply that you suffer no hurt
(which really is why I swore the oath)
to take punchbag talk not of my making,
then to type it all up before the next ten
and the next ten tens until we hit the target
of more casualties, more cuts, more sutures
and we carry on talking faster, typing faster.
No tears, tap, come again, tap, next please.
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ANDY CROFT welcomes the publication of an anthology of recent poems published by the Morning Star, and hopes it becomes an annual event
RUTH AYLETT reviews two collections of outright political poetry
by Widad Nabi