The Art of Seeing: Visions of Manchester The seventeen works presented below originate from black-and-white photographs I captured across Greater Manchester many years ago. Through digital brushes and filters, these images have been reimagined and transformed, shifting from documentary records into expressive artworks. Each piece reflects both the architectural memory of place and the creative act of refashioning, where the familiar urban landscape is rendered anew in color,

Deliquescent Bodies (Love Parade) I hope for night; it comes; it is here; it comes with rain & river, & the lights are electric. I am offered a drink & the mercury blue neon over the door catches my eye, tears open the retina, imbuing the optic nerve with cold cathode gas, ionising my nervous system to the limit. Breathing carbon dioxide, I metabolize my own body. I am a pillar of ether by the exit door. But I’m not alone. We all matter less than we did before,

Image: 'A grey day on the Mersey' by Radarsmum67 (Wikimedia) Cast Iron Shore (the 'Cazzy') Where the river of tranquillity meets the lake of fire, There arises a bronze sea, from which headless Monsters of bad dreams emerge onto the Cast Iron Shore. Amazing how many broken ships run aground, all rusted And kelped by the red water. Saint Michael looks down, Amidst battlements and parapets, a sword in hand, ready to scrap.

Yehudah, I Make You Mine From out of the banks of the muddy Jordan River, I make you Mine. Into shape I press the grit, into shape I knead the clay And your body clings to my fingers. I knead and a verb puts you in motion. I cut and I layer and an adjective fleshes out your shape. I slap and I roll and a rhyme gives you weight. I model and I sculpt and a noun marks you as a thing. With a name, I form you in my image (Your name is on my tongue). With a name, I firm you

Shaddai A plant grows from the Nile, the שׁ, primordial cause, rooted in the water, breathing in the air, the commencement of births, becomings, and of all flows.

A Skein of Black Water A Skein of Black Water The moon appeared to float on a skein of black water and a wind sang a high pitch B, 246.94 Hertz. And something else – a distant police car? Or a muffled bell tolling the lost river Dene?

The North Is Rain strikes terraces stacked in brown brick And wind blows through the underpass. Two fat-breasted pigeons Fly over York Minster; a single seagull Squats in Speke. I’m out there burying neolithic arrowheads On Kersal Moor & freshwater shrimping In the Irwell, or I’m cruising Upriver, crazy as a Lune & sauntering A Sunday Through Morecambe Bay, my bat-black cape Flapping all the way to Whitby Abbey. Of note is tonight’s Full fr

City Poem Under the iron bridge, office workers, wet with rain, crowd on coaches & trams. I stay by the river & watch them go. Everything is flowing now, a hissing juggernaut of lorries, cars, buses, passenger trains – varying streams of atoms in rapid motion – racing ahead of time; streaking by factories, allotments, tower-blocks, back-to-back slums; terminating or turning at the last suburb, at the conurbation’s edge, where the sun slips down the sky, into a

The Irwell - a river poem Rock-solid ground loosens, shifts to liquid, slips fast away beneath my feet. The water dreams of boats, of willow banks, not a foul stream of refuse but a seam alive with freshwater shrimp, roach, and brown trout. A mallard halts — strums his feathers, beats the air into rhythm, poised to rise above this stretch, this blue-lined artery we call the River Irwell.

A mallard stops, strums His feathers, beats his wings, Ready to fly over this stretch Of blue-lined water

Aquarius So, the routes of the city, all its paths, arteries and overflows – the scummy run-offs from sewers and roads – end or start on the muddy banks of the sallow-tree river. Water does what it knows: It coils and uncoils like a gut over decades-old millstone grit, between the crumbling, rumbling jaws of Anglo-Saxon stone; Sneaks and snakes under willow trees; runs past hospitals, factories, back-to-back slums, picking up brand new stories and the gho