Reviews of Habibi Funk 031, Kayatibu, and The Good Ones
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21st-century poetry
Reviews of collections by Sylvia Pankhurst, Chawki Abdelamir and Martin Hayes
RESOLUTE: Sylvia Pankhurst recovering from her hunger strike in prison
[N Smith]
SIMON DUFF relishes the cross contamination of Damien Hirst’s greatest hits by street artists from France and the US
In view of the grooming gangs inquiry, SIMON PARSONS feels the relevance of this powerful examination of trauma suffered at Medomsley Youth Detention Centre
JOHN GREEN doubts the motivations of a US war photographer who never questions why, or for whom, she is producing images of imperialist conflict
MARIA DUARTE reviews Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, Hedda, The Mastermind, and Regretting You
TONY CONWAY welcomes a thrilling and concise history of Hope not Hate, that is also a manual full of tactical advice
PAUL DONOVAN welcomes an inspiring account of living with deafness that has important lessons for the treatment of deaf people in today’s UK
EXACTLY a hundred years ago, Sylvia Pankhurst was sentenced to six months in prison for publishing articles in the Workers’ Dreadnought urging London dockers not to load ships with arms to be used against the infant Soviet Union.
At her trial she declared: “Capitalism is a wrong system of society and it has got to be smashed — I would give my life to smash it.”
In Holloway prison she began writing a series of poems about the working-class women she met there. Because the authorities refused to allow her pen and paper, she had to use chalk to write what she called her “faithful lines upon inconsistent slate.”
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PATRICK JONES recommends a vital anthology from Afghan and Iranian poets where the political and personal fuse into witness-bearing and manifesto-making
RON JACOBS recommends a painstaking study of the communists and revolutionaries who congregated in Moscow after 1917
RUTH AYLETT reviews two books of poetry, one by the Iranian American Marjorie Lofti, the other by the British Lebanese Omar Sabbagh