SIMON PARSONS applauds an original, visual and movement-based take on the birth and death of a relationship
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Winning hearts and minds beats a corporate gong any day
21st century poetry with Andy Croft
JOHN GREEN’s palette is tickled by useful information leavened by amusing and unusual anecdotes, incidental gossip and scare stories
The bard contemplates X — anti-human vomit soup with dog shit croutons — and the Tory recycling bin that is Reform
ALAN MORRISON recommends an outstanding and timely anthology of poems that reflect the experience and consequences of African migration
BINOY KAMPMARK examines the food racket as evidenced by the recent promotion of Italian cuisine to the status of ‘intangible national heritage’
FIONA O’CONNOR and MARIA DUARTE review State of Statelessness, Rental Family, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, and The Rip
HAVE you ever noticed how the word “poet” is increasingly accompanied by the automatic prefix “award-winning”?
National Poetry Day — when a panel of award-winning poets give an award to an award-winning poet — is no longer a celebration of poetry but of the PR machinery of corporate publishers.
As poet and publisher Michael Schmidt has argued: “Poetry prizes are now the vehicle of literary reception. Control the prizes and you control the culture of reception.”
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ANDY CROFT welcomes the publication of an anthology of recent poems published by the Morning Star, and hopes it becomes an annual event
KEN COCKBURN assesses the art of Ian Hamilton Finlay for the experience of warfare it incited and represents
PATRICK JONES recommends a vital anthology from Afghan and Iranian poets where the political and personal fuse into witness-bearing and manifesto-making
REBECCA LOWE admires a complex, multi-layered working-class novel whose heart is the writer's self-discovery as a poet