Skip to main content
Advertise with the Morning Star
21st-century poetry
Reviews of latest collections from Alan Morrison, Kevin Higgins, Graham Fulton, RF Francis and James Womack

“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.

The 95th Anniversary Appeal
Support the Morning Star
You have reached the free limit.
Subscribe to continue reading.
Similar stories
sausages
Books / 18 July 2025
18 July 2025

ANDY CROFT rallies poets to the impossible task of speaking truth to a tin-eared politician

The Palisades Fire that started in the City of Los Angeles,
Books / 1 April 2025
1 April 2025
IAN SINCLAIR draws attention to the powerful role that literature plays in foreseeing the way humanity will deal with climate crisis
Letters from Latin America / 4 March 2025
4 March 2025
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
IMPROVE THE BLANK PAGE: Installation by Nicanor Parra at the
Book Review / 3 January 2025
3 January 2025
ALISTAIR FINDLAY welcomes a collection of essays from one of the cultural left’s most respected speakers and activists