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ANGUS REID urges us to understand the persecution of Jason Arday from a political and historical perspective, and to see the victim in human terms
Poetry: A breathtaking valedictory collection
21st Century Poetry by ANDY CROFT
Re-releases of the classics Gypsy Rhumba and Buena Vista Social Club, and a stunning album by Palestinian artist Faris Ishaq
Nothing, says ANDY HEDGECOCK, can rescue this undistinguished amalgam of ponderous melodrama and shallow philosophical speculation
JAMIE BRITTON invites readers to visit 3,500 locals as part of a marathon artistic pub crawl
JOHN GREEN welcomes a valuable and incisive analysis of a world become hyperpolitical but without the mass movement institutions to represent it
Sebastian Barker was one of our very best poets. His last collection, The Land Of Gold (Enitharmon, £9.99) was published just before he died in January.
Written when Barker knew he was dying, it is a book about mortality and loss (“Life is a radiant highway rippling through flowers, a patina of gold — over an earthquake territory”).
But it would be hard to find a more beautiful and rapturous celebration of living and loving, the natural world and the human body: “When the sun came over the mountains,/I rose from the sheets and threw open the shutters/On the four corners of the world of your body.”
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ALAN MORRISON welcomes a new collection from the most imaginative and committed ecopoet of our time
ALAN MORRISON recommends a consummate, heart-warming collection about a working-class upbringing in the industrial north-east