Kirjahaku

It's Christmas. Relatives you hardly ever see and who are now very different from you arrive at your house for the festivities. No-one receives a present that is at all appropriate. Culinary disasters abound. Long-buried resentmen's rear their ugly heads as the alcohol flows and tongues are loosened. Comfort and Joy, Mike Harding's comedy, is painfully -- but always amusingly -- familiar.-Large flexible cast

For Pat, recently widowed, this year's charabanc trip to Whitby is tinged with sadness, but she is determined to enjoy herself. Phil and Edna provide entertainment with old-time dancing. Phil, too, is trying to enjoy herself, despite being trapped in a dead marriage, and during their first dance together he and Pat feel the unexpected spark of mutual attraction. Despite disapproval from others, they decide to seize this second chance and start a new life together.8 women, 4 men

This hilarious play concerns the wedding of Deirdre and Mark. The fun begins on the stag night when an inebriated Mark is chained to a lamppost with a blow-up rubber doll. The wedding itself is quite high spirited too with half the guests, including the priest, suffering blinding hangovers. The play ends in comic chaos when Father Molloy, paralytically drunk, stumbles into the reception clad only in his ecclesiastical underwear, brandishing the blow-up doll!5 women, 9 men

When their wives join the Women's Peace Movement, Nobby, Tommy and Ken, pals in the Territorial Army, treat it as a joke. But as the women become more involved in demonstrations the men become the laughing stock of their TA battalion. Finally, the women, attempting to make their husbands give up the army, go on sexual strike with the slogan "No Nooky Against the Nukes". A wry, amusing look at the nuclear disarmament issue set in the author's North of England.4 women, 3 men

The apostle Paul, in his letters to the churches, introduces what he calls "the mystery". The incarnation, the gospel message, and the formation of the church of Jesus Christ is God's eternal plan and purpose. Learn how precious and valuable you are to God's eternal plan, called "the mystery."

Well-known as a stand up comic and folk musician, Mike Harding is now equally known for his rich and varied poetry.Music, place, landscape, politics, memories and stories have always been Mike Harding’s creative touchstones, never more so than in ‘The Lonely Zoroastrian’, his first collection since the 2020 pandemic and lockdown, both of which feature in some of the earlier poems in this book.Storytelling is the essence of his work whether telling the true story of a lost city buried under the ice cap, the curse an old Ukrainian woman laid on a group of Russian soldiers or stories from his beloved Connemara like Islandman and St Luke’s Little Summer.From his ‘little shed of words’ here is Mike Harding ‘singing about the dark times’.

This collection of poems ranges from dystopian visions of modern day London in 'Strange Lights over Bexleyheath', lust-driven nostalgia in 'Sligo Maid', to a sombre walk through Glasgow in 'In the Necropolis'.

While working for the BBC on a feature programme on Irish folk singer Dolores Keane, Mike Harding found himself in Clifden and in an estate agent’s window found what would become his Irish home, a traditional cottage that had lain empty for almost twenty years with a rotted corrugated iron roof and neither doors nor windows. The view out over Cleggan Bay however was stunning.Two years of hard work turned it back into a home and it was in that home, while looking out over Clegan Bay that much of his latest book of poems, The Connemara Cantos, was written. Not all of these poems are about Connemara, they are also about Irish immigrants on building sites in Manchester, pubs in London and the beauty of Irish traditional music; but all the poems in this book were either written in or inspired by the very special place that is Connemara – not a county, not a political entity but perhaps something much wider – a state of the soul.

In this new collection, Harding casts his poetic line to retrieve ghosts from the near and more distant past, his eyes and ears caught by fragments snagged in his visual and aural memory.

‘What is a poet?’ the title poem of this collection, Cosmos Mariner, asks and answers: ‘word-peckers, rhyming jackdaws of the world’. The Cosmos Mariner was a real ship which caught the attention of American poet Conrad Aiken (1889 – 1973) and piqued his interest further when, checking the shipping news, he found its destination was listed as ‘unknown’. This trope reappears throughout the dark undertow of this collection which contains poems reflecting the distracted political times of today. Against this, gentler poems such as The Cleggan Sonnets and The Curve of Love show Harding’s gift for capturing the fleeting moment of sight and sound and fixing them with a piercing simplicity that remains in the memory.