Abeer Ameer

Nov 26, 2023 | yorkshiretimes.co.uk | Keith Hutson |Isabel Galleymore |Abeer Ameer |Matthew Stewart

I make no apology for including an old favourite as this week’s Poem of the Week. Keith Hutson’s poetry is an extension of the life he once lived. As an experienced comedy writer and old hand in the theatre industry, he has a natural sympathy with comics and entertainers of a certain historical vintage, their predecessors in Music Hall and on the early twentieth century stage. Hutson’s impulse, beyond the simple emotion of affinity, is empathic.

Nov 24, 2023 | cumbriatimes.co.uk | It’s Rossini |Isabel Galleymore |Abeer Ameer |Matthew Stewart

artsWith the collective sentiments so thoroughly slapped and tickled, and the audience washed-up in a tide of goodwill, it would be both pointless and churlish to find fault in Thursday’s premiere of The Barber of Seville at Bradford’s St George’s Hall. And if the poet and broadcaster Ian McMillan’s Yorkshire dialect take on Rossini’s comic masterpiece stretched credulity to breaking point, it didn’t matter a whit.

Nov 20, 2023 | yorkshiretimes.co.uk | Isabel Galleymore |Abeer Ameer |Matthew Stewart |Rachel Bower

artsIt is a testament to the power and authority of the combined forces of Langcliffe Singers and Settle Orchestra that they should persuade a confirmed Baroque enthusiast to recalibrate his compass. And you needn’t be a devotee of German Romanticism to have relished the sheer verve of Saturday evening’s performance of Brahms’ Ein Deutsches Requiem, in the evocative space of Skipton’s Christ Church.

Nov 17, 2023 | yorkshiretimes.co.uk | Isabel Galleymore |Abeer Ameer |Matthew Stewart |Rachel Bower

If ever you were to doubt the educational potential of poetry, then Isabel Galleymore’s astonishing poem reveals, in acrobatic metaphors and linguistic circumlocution, as much about creatures that shuffle ungainly about the sea bed as you could ever learn from an aridly moribund textbook on marine biology.

Nov 11, 2023 | yorkshiretimes.co.uk | Abeer Ameer |Matthew Stewart |Rachel Bower |Alice Fowler

artsBystanderAlso known as collateral damage. The usual story for his type:minding his own businesstending to his pomelos and pomegranatesand watering his carnations. His granddaughter watchesas he spreads his fig leaf sap to cure his psoriasis. Guided missilesdon’t show the usual signs of guidance. They don’t shout Hallelujah,they don’t clap in praise of the Lordand they don’t quietly come seeking a Bodhi tree under which to sit cross-leggedto reach Enlightenment.