MARIA DUARTE recommends a remarkable study of the friendship between a Palestinian and a Pakistani, broken by a hostile state
Latest editorial
Landscapes laden with history
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
STUART LAYCOCK visited Bosnia seven times with a medical charity during the civil wars in Yugoslavia and Zone: Poems of the Bosnian War (Mica Press, £7) recalls his experiences in a country “heavy with history and death.../where the 20th century stops/where it slumps into piled earth grave/wooden marker post thrust/stake-like into its vampire heart.”
Those and other lines exemplify how Laycock is especially good at describing the bleak details of a landscape transformed by war:
“The lamp-post is/a thing of almost strange beauty,/something that belongs perhaps/in a plush West End art gallery,/or a fine white-walled museum./Transformed by the/frontline’s flying metal/from solid pillar to a/delicate lace-like structure... pierced/time and time again/by bullets and shells.”
Similar stories
GORDON PARSONS appreciates fine performances and a feel for ambiguity, but misses the music of the dialogue
JAN WOOLF relishes an extensive history of our long relationship to trees in Britain that underlines the current emergency
From post-human revolution in Puerto Rico to trans poetics and queer mythmaking, these three books that imagine new ways of being together
ALAN MORRISON recommends a consummate, heart-warming collection about a working-class upbringing in the industrial north-east