LEO BOIX recommends a ravishing, full-bodied drama about the intensely demanding and emotional art of Kabuki theatre
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21st-century poetry
Reviews of latest collections from Alan Morrison, Kevin Higgins, Graham Fulton, RF Francis and James Womack
On the day of the election, MARTIN GOLLAN reflects on the perennial relationship between the far-right and the back-hander
MARY CONWAY is gripped by the powerful emotional journeys portrayed by the parents of the perpetrator and victims of a mass shooting
LEO BOIX reviews a novel where shadows deceive and mortality looms, and a poetry collection that refuses to dim
ROBIN STYLES welcomes a boundary pushing work of fiction exploring the life and ideas of the godmother of modernism
PAUL DONOVAN recommends an energetic adaptation of Ken Kesey’s novel, that emphasises how psychiatry is a tool in the hands of a racist agenda
“O WHAT hope for red roses/To grow among the thorns of red-top-hypnotised, populist-/Supporting proles, working-class Faragistes, Workington/‘Gammons’, purple-rinse reactionaries, blue collar/Conservatives, proletarian Tories (Old Benjamin Disraeli’s/Angels in Marble coming back to haunt us through/Poltergeist psephologists, now Boris’s blue collars, his batmen/Bootscrapers)...”
So begins Alan Morrison’s new epic poem Anxious Corporals (Smokestack Books, £7.99).
It’s an extraordinary essay in verse about education and class, deference and independence, reason and reaction, the victory of shopkeeper values and the defeat of the postwar consensus.
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