WILL STONE fact-checks the colourful life of Ozzy Osbourne
21st-century poetry
Latest collections from Culture Matters, Fran Lock, Jay Bernard and Chris Nash
Rebooting the saints: Fran Lock
JAMES CROSSLEY applauds a lucid biography of the German radical preacher who reemerged as a hero in the GDR
Prizes all round: the Bard hands plaudits to the Miners Gala, OT&JC, Joe Solo, Black Sabbath’s frontman and the Lionesses
Star cartoonist JAMIE BRITTON is in awe of a graphic novel of epic proportions that explores class, religion and globalisation via the strange cultivation of Ginseng in the US Midwest
GUILLERMO THOMAS is intrigued by a history of the Middle East that demonstrates how promising post colonial beginnings were snuffed out by Western imperialist interests
MARIA DUARTE recommends the intricate study of a high-performance and highly dysfuntional German family
FOR anyone unexcited by the news that the Forward prize for the best first collection has just been given to a book of poems about playing Super Mario, four important new books of poetry about things that matter might stir the spirits.
As Rob Walton puts it in the collection Release a Rage of Red (Culture Matters, £5): “Write poems on the tins you put in the foodbank/Write verse about how foodbank even became a word/Write about alternatives to foodbanks… Write about writing a Closed sign on the last foodbank.”
The collection is the third anthology of entries to the annual Unite-sponsored Bread and Roses award. Edited by Mike Quille, the book is a furious reply to the insular and trivial narcissism of so much of the contemporary British poetry scene.
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ANDY CROFT rallies poets to the impossible task of speaking truth to a tin-eared politician
New titles from Fran Lock, Richard Skinner, Tara Bergin and Mark A Murphy
New titles from Kurdish poet İlhan Sami Comak and Volker Braun, one of Germany’s most important writers
New collections from Neil Fulwood, Kevin Higgins, Clare Saponia, Nora Blascsok and Peter Godfrey
