CHRIS SEARLE welcomes a startling vision of contemporary Newport from a veteran photographer of the British working class
Latest editorial
Resisting the temptation of silence
21st century poetry with Andy Croft
ANGUS REID recommends a very unusual documentary: a love story between two disillusioned journalists
In verse and polemic, the bard points out that he is a poet and musician, not a political party
MARIA DUARTE, JAMES WALSH and ANDY HEDGECOCK review The Invite, My Father’s Island, Nirvanna: the Band, the Show, the Movie, and Oh My Goodness!
PAUL DONOVAN is chilled by the contemporary resonance of Harper Lee’s coming of age tale amidst racism and white supremacy in this excellent production
GEOFF BOTTOMS recommends the unashamedly light-hearted escapism on offer in this stage version of the 1963 film
THERE is an early poem in Hans Magnus Enzensberger: New Selected Poems (Bloodaxe, £15) in which he explains why poets “do not tell the truth”:
“Because the thirsty man/does not give mouth to his thirst./Because proletariat is a word/which will not pass the lips of the proletariat... Because it is someone else,/always someone else,/who does the talking,/and because he/who is being talked about,/keeps his silence.”
It’s an issue to which Enzensberger has repeatedly returned — how do you use language to talk about things? How do you use words to tell the truth about language? How, in a noisy world, do you resist the temptations of silence?
Similar stories
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
Two inspring books — that’s your New Year’s musing from me on January 2 2026
ANDY CROFT rallies poets to the impossible task of speaking truth to a tin-eared politician