JOHN GREEN is fascinated by a very readable account of Britain’s involvement in South America
21st Century Poetry with ANDY CROFT
New collections from Neil Fulwood, Kevin Higgins, Clare Saponia, Nora Blascsok and Peter Godfrey
Strip cartoons used to be the bread and butter of newspapers and they have been around for centuries. MICHAL BONCZA asks our own Paul Tanner about which bees are in his bonnet
GORDON PARSONS acknowledges the authority with which Sarah Kane’s theatrical justification for suicide has resonance today
RON JACOBS welcomes a timely homage to one of the IWW and CPUSA’s most effective orators
ANDY HEDGECOCK relishes an exuberant blend of emotion and analysis that captures the politics and contrarian nature of the French composer
ANDY CROFT rallies poets to the impossible task of speaking truth to a tin-eared politician
MAD PARADE (Smokestack Books, £7.99) by Nottingham bus driver Neil Fulwood is a collection of white-hot political satirical poems taking the piss out of some of the knaves and fools who parade their poisonous egos across the stage — like Blair, Johnson, Farage, Robinson, Starmer and Trump.
Turning his attention to “the relevance, integrity and political impact” of Change UK (remember them?), Fulwood gives us an empty page.
There is a great sequence imagining Johnson as the Fat Controller in a reboot of Thomas the Tank Engine, and Starmer as a character in Camberwick Green.
Elsewhere Starmer turns up rapping along with Coolio:
“Been spending all my time / Living in a milquetoast paradise. / Made my rep getting hard on crime / Living in a lawyer’s paradise. / Now I’m a centrist in my prime / Living in a milquetoast paradise. / I treat the Left like dirt or slime / Living in a milquetoast paradise…”
Funny, furious and profane, it’s a book of hit-and-run poems, take-no-prisoners, drive-by attacks in verse on the ancien regime.
Irish poet Kevin Higgins’s new collection, Ecstatic (Salmon Poetry, £11) is also full of well-timed political satires.
Higgins employs an extravagant and absurd logic to depict the extravagant absurdities of our age in poems like Homage to Henry Kissinger, Our Posh Liberal Friends, and Priti Patel’s Denial.
In Febrile, Scotland and Ireland “pack their bright new suitcases / and stride palely towards the exit, / like soon-to-be ex-wives,” while post-Brexit “withered Englishmen celebrate / their independence and look forward / to having to dress their own bed sores / in second hand bandages they’ll get free / with every glass of Wetherspoon’s / English sparkling wine.”
Best of the lot is And Now for the Good News:
“The ocean is five percent less on fire / than it would be if they’d elected the other guy. / No new viruses have leapt from the Amazon / so far today. Or if they have / we don’t yet know their names… The G7 summit has given the nod / to lobbing no more missiles than absolutely necessary / at Russian and Chinese ships… And the doctor assures me / I’ll be safely in the ground / before the two hundred mile an hour / winds tear the roof off the house.”
Clare Saponia’s Federal Gods (Palewell Press, £9.99) addresses head-on the refugee crisis in Europe, recording in furious detail the miserable realities behind the newspaper headlines of people hungry for life, but starved of kindness:
“The pictures in the papers mirrored and multiplied you into fiction. Science fiction… You became carrion. / You became freaks / ogres / titans / cyclops… You became disease. Without knowing it… Feeding, sleeping, dreaming.”
Nora Blascsok’s <body>of work</body> (Broken Sleep Books, £7.50) is about work, specifically the endless, mind-numbing tasks of contemporary office-work — spreadsheets,
emails, daily briefings, KPIs, infographics, meetings.
The poems are broken up on the page into claustrophobic blocks of words and phrases, sometimes heavily redacted, suggesting the madness of so many lives lived on company time: “Perform desk assessment. / Take breaks by looking / At wall outside window. Throw unnecessary items behind me. / Arrange keyboard in parallel with mouse pad.”
Peter Godfrey’s first collection, Grace Note (Smokestack Books, £7.99) is a book of reports from the front line, messages sent from over the border, beyond the edge of the map — Madrid 1939, Oradour 1944, Hiroshima 1945, Santiago 1973, San Carlos Bay 1982.
It’s a celebration of those who — like Rene Magritte, Oscar Niemeyer, Wat Tyler and Jacques Brel — have understood “the glory of pedalling the wrong way on a one-way street.”
In Red Bishop Godfrey pays tribute to the murdered El Salvadorean bishop Dom Helder Camara, who once observed: ‘‘When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint; when I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a Communist” —
“Here in the cathedral at Olinda / though your voice is gone / a breeze ruffles fresh flowers, / the church bell tolls, / a single bird in flight / carries your credo / out through palm trees / over the turquoise sea, / the sole, heretical truth… that food and shelter / are for all to share.”
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