CityLife

Buzz of the Modern Bee

IF Manchester is sometimes guilty of a peculiarly inward-looking self-obsession, this display of poetry by 23-year-old local wordsmith Gerard Jenkins-Omar typifies the worst of it.
 

That the exhibition should come at a time when town is loading its cultural palette with paints drawn from further afield than ever before, makes the hackneyed self-eulogising on offer here even more disappointing.
 

Flitting between abstract, freeform verse and strangely literal descriptions of the city, the work reads like two Shameless caricatures playing word association.

By-numbers references to the Hacienda and the Arndale contribute to the tunnel-visioned view.
 

Truly global future

As one man’s take on the subject of Mancunia, these poems cannot be faulted; it just seems a shame that a poet so young should take such an insular and retrospective view of a city with a truly global future (although it was billed as a look at the past decade, what did we expect?)
 

Evidently inspired by Lemm Sissay but lacking the beat brilliance of the older scribe’s work, Jenkins-Omar’s finest flourishes find themselves stultified by bizarre and clumsy constructions (“Sunsets decorated with people’s curtains/or blinds as it is in this modern age”) and drug references that are at least 14 years out of date.
 

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