IAN SINCLAIR draws attention to the powerful role that literature plays in foreseeing the way humanity will deal with climate crisis
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Class War as Culture War
ALISTAIR FINDLAY welcomes a collection of essays from one of the cultural left’s most respected speakers and activists
croft
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The Privatisation of Poetry,
Andy Croft, Broken Sleep Books, £13.99
IN this book Andy Croft brings together 21 essays and reviews first published in the Morning Star and a wide range of literary and online magazines between 1994-2024, including the New Statesman, London Magazine, PN Review, Scratch and Thumbscrew — several at the heart of the “art” poetry establishment he criticises.
Collectively these pieces underscore the theme articulated by his friend and collaborator, the legendary popular performance poet Adrian Mitchell: “Most people ignore poetry because most poetry ignores most people.”
With Croft, Mitchell co-edited the ground-breaking left movement anthology Red Sky At Night, 2003, which reached back to Blake and the Chartists and forward to the contemporary, and which included Poet Laureates and Scottish Makars writing art poetry, certainly, but from the left.
More from this author
ALISTAIR FINDLAY welcomes a fine collection of football poems that celebrate a generational shift in both the sport and the culture
ALISTAIR FINDLAY recommends the first representative selection in English of the poetry of the Soviet war correspondent Ilya Ehrenburg
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ALISTAIR FINDLAY introduces the work of the four women poets whose work will feature on our pages this month
