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Poetry round-up 2022 with ANDY CROFT
As usual at this time of year poets talk about the books of poetry they have most enjoyed reading in the last 12 months
BENJAMIN POTHIER suggests that Palaeolithic cave paintings in Spain point to the ceremonial use of hallucinogenic flora
The bard confirms that the right has a humour bypass, and replays the English Revolution on period instruments
MARIA DUARTE and ANDY HEDGECOCK review Sunny Dancer, Tony, Songs of Forgotten Trees, and The End of Oak Street
JOHN GREEN relishes a powerful and moving drama that explores the lived realities of west London’s Punjabi community
MARTIN HALL welcomes a plea for greater compassion between believer and non-believer via the framework of philosophical enquiry
David Constantine
THE book of poems I’ve been most moved by this year is John Foggin’s Pressed for Time (Calder Valley Poetry). It’s a very various collection, locally rooted but far-reaching in its ramifications.
Its urgency is there in the title: so much still wants saying, saying again, out of one man’s life and addressing the general good but also the ills, the accelerating drift towards social undoing.
The injunction, spoken or not, of one poem after another is: Attend! So much beauty, so much love, want their due attention. Attend, before it’s too late, to their fragility, to the threats.
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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
RUTH AYLETT reviews two collections of outright political poetry
KEN COCKBURN relishes the memoir of a translator, but wonders whether the autobiography underlying the impulse would make a better book