SIMON PARSONS applauds an original, visual and movement-based take on the birth and death of a relationship
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21st-century poetry
Reviews of latest collections from Alan Morrison, Kevin Higgins, Graham Fulton, RF Francis and James Womack
JOHN GREEN’s palette is tickled by useful information leavened by amusing and unusual anecdotes, incidental gossip and scare stories
The bard contemplates X — anti-human vomit soup with dog shit croutons — and the Tory recycling bin that is Reform
ALAN MORRISON recommends an outstanding and timely anthology of poems that reflect the experience and consequences of African migration
BINOY KAMPMARK examines the food racket as evidenced by the recent promotion of Italian cuisine to the status of ‘intangible national heritage’
FIONA O’CONNOR and MARIA DUARTE review State of Statelessness, Rental Family, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, and The Rip
“O WHAT hope for red roses/To grow among the thorns of red-top-hypnotised, populist-/Supporting proles, working-class Faragistes, Workington/‘Gammons’, purple-rinse reactionaries, blue collar/Conservatives, proletarian Tories (Old Benjamin Disraeli’s/Angels in Marble coming back to haunt us through/Poltergeist psephologists, now Boris’s blue collars, his batmen/Bootscrapers)...”
So begins Alan Morrison’s new epic poem Anxious Corporals (Smokestack Books, £7.99).
It’s an extraordinary essay in verse about education and class, deference and independence, reason and reaction, the victory of shopkeeper values and the defeat of the postwar consensus.
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Looking for moral co-ordinates after a tough year for rational political thinking and shared human morality
ANDY CROFT rallies poets to the impossible task of speaking truth to a tin-eared politician
IAN SINCLAIR draws attention to the powerful role that literature plays in foreseeing the way humanity will deal with climate crisis
A pamphlet by British Latinx poet Patrick Romero McCafferty, poetry by Anglo-Argentinian Miguel Cullen, and a book of conjuring poems by Mexican Pedro Serrano