MARIA DUARTE recommends a remarkable study of the friendship between a Palestinian and a Pakistani, broken by a hostile state
Latest editorial
Original lines on the working-class experience
21st century poetry with Andy Croft
MATTHEW HAWKINS rakes through un-fancy words and flair-free summaries to find who and what might be flamboyant
PETER MASON is exhilarated by an exciting, well-considered and historically minded tribute to the great Trinidadian instrument
Reducing historical lives to ‘male’ and ‘female’ roles, we lose the nuance of those lives and a clearer understanding of past societies, suggests CLAIRE ISABELLA GILMOUR
CHRIS SEARLE relishes the genius of pianist Alexander Hawkins, his many ensembles, and his new album
ALISON CARR’S Corner Shop Cowgirl (Iron Press, £7) is one of the most original poetry books of the year, cleverly imagining her native Co Durham as a lawless Wild West landscape of tumbleweed towns, one-armed bandits, line-dancers, outlaws and the “coyote calls of men without work.”
Between the Indian takeaways and the empty charity shops lies the “Lost Chance Saloon,” where most afternoons you can find the old timers “galloping through bullet country/ Among the slow burning pints,/Ash trays, pork scratchings/And flipped beer mats”:
“A limp-along cowboy,/Once a miner,/He now counts out his future in coins from a jar,/As he takes his seat at the end of the bar./He calculates every penny, holds tight to every pound,/His meagre pension must go round and round.”
Similar stories
JAN WOOLF relishes an extensive history of our long relationship to trees in Britain that underlines the current emergency
ALAN MORRISON welcomes a new collection from the most imaginative and committed ecopoet of our time
Thousands of remarkable Britons left ordinary lives behind to join the struggle against Franco. Here is a snapshot of those who answered the call
ALEX HALL is fascinated by a lucid and historically convincing account of how rent has dominated capitalist economies from feudalism to modernity