MATTHEW HAWKINS applauds a psychotherapist’s disection of William Blake
Singing about the dark times
CHILE DEMANDS: 'Until dignity is customary'
[Carlos Figueroa/CC] 
New releases from Christina Alden and Alex Patterson, Odette Michell, Clementine Lovell
JOHN GREEN is fascinated by a very readable account of Britain’s involvement in South America
Strip cartoons used to be the bread and butter of newspapers and they have been around for centuries. MICHAL BONCZA asks our own Paul Tanner about which bees are in his bonnet
GORDON PARSONS acknowledges the authority with which Sarah Kane’s theatrical justification for suicide has resonance today
RON JACOBS welcomes a timely homage to one of the IWW and CPUSA’s most effective orators
“IN THE dark times will there be singing?” Bertolt Brecht famously asked when he was in exile. His answer was that “there will be singing about the dark times.” Here are four strong new collections about the dark times in which we now find ourselves.
Mike Jenkins (ed) Gwrthryfel/Uprising (Culture Matters, £12) is a fantastic collection of radical poetry from contemporary Wales. There are almost 80 poems here, in English and Welsh, including some great poems by Sheenagh Pugh, Des Mannay, Alun Rees, Christopher Meredith, Tracey Rhys, Annest Gwilym (Wales for Sale) and Anne Phillips (We are a proud nation of call centres).
It is a collection of poems about violence – against the poor, against women, against language, against common decency, against Nature. In Gelliwastad Ablaze Dyfan Lewis watches the summer-dry gorse burn one night above Swansea:
More from this author
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
