On the day of the election, MARTIN GOLLAN reflects on the perennial relationship between the far-right and the back-hander
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Red
by Neil Young
Rosa Luxemburg memorial at the site where her corpse was thrown into the Landwehr Canal in Berlin
[Manfred Brückels/CC]
MARY CONWAY is gripped by the powerful emotional journeys portrayed by the parents of the perpetrator and victims of a mass shooting
LEO BOIX reviews a novel where shadows deceive and mortality looms, and a poetry collection that refuses to dim
ROBIN STYLES welcomes a boundary pushing work of fiction exploring the life and ideas of the godmother of modernism
PAUL DONOVAN recommends an energetic adaptation of Ken Kesey’s novel, that emphasises how psychiatry is a tool in the hands of a racist agenda
ED WAUGH introduces a special event to commemorate the centenary of the 1926 General Strike
Reviews of Charlotte Cornfield, Michael Weston King, and Gun Outfit
i.m. Rosa Luxemburg
Yours is the ghost in the waters even now.
When you were tipped into the Landwehr Canal
Europe sank. Too many worlds
that might have glanced their way
into being were not hewn.
A rifle butt, a shot to the skull,
the squalor and contempt of a few
hired men, that’s all it took.
History shrank. Peoples and nations
shrank to the drench of your skirt.
In some other version,
I can glimpse you keep on walking
beyond this moment,
the rifle is paused,
the trigger-finger hesitates:
Adolf stews obscurely in a gutter,
the sailors of Kronstadt prevail,
Leon goes back to reviewing,
the world tilts with you, Rosa,
this is your revolution worth knowing.
Similar stories
RUTH AYLETT reviews two collections of outright political poetry
by Christopher Norris
by Helen McSherry
Poems by Mohammed Moussa, Mark Kirkbride, Omar Sabbagh, Ruth Aylett, Mark Paffard and Patrick Jones