ALEX HALL is disgusted by the misuse of ‘emotional narratives’ to justify uninformed geo-political prejudice
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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
IMPROVE THE BLANK PAGE: Installation by Nicanor Parra at the Centro Cultural Palacio La Moneda, Santiago, in 2007: "In case of resurrection do turn anticlockwise, this coffin is automatic."
SUE TURNER welcomes a thoughtful, engaging book that lays bare the economic realities of global waste management
JOHN GREEN welcomes an insider account of the achievements and failures of the transition to democracy in Portugal
SIMON PARSONS applauds an imaginative and absorbing updating of Strindberg’s classic
PETER MASON is enthralled by an assembly of objects, ancient and modern, that have lain in the mud of London’s river
MICK McSHANE rubs shoulders with Mod legend Steve Craddock and joins in with the joyous Glasgow choir
DENNIS BROE sifts out the ideological bias of the newest TV series offerings, and picks out what to see, and what to avoid
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.
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