RITA DI SANTO draws attention to a new film that features Ken Loach and Jeremy Corbyn, and their personal experience of media misrepresentation
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21st Century Poetry with ANDY CROFT
New titles from Fran Lock, Richard Skinner, Tara Bergin and Mark A Murphy
JULIA TOPPIN recommends Patti Smith’s eloquent memoir that wrestles with the beauty and sorrow of a lifetime
MARJORIE MAYO welcomes an account of family life after Oscar Wilde, a cathartic exercise, written by his grandson
KEN COCKBURN guides us through a survey of Chekov’s early short fiction, and the groundwork it laid for his later masterpieces
ANDY HEDGECOCK revels in a hugely enjoyable but deadly serious examination of the 1930s, that is an indictment of our own era
The bard distills our hellish times into fiery words
AFTER all those appalling, fawning poems about the monarchy (leaving some writers who should have known better looking rather foolish), it is a relief to come across Fran Lock’s Sid James at the Poetry Society:
“Cor blimey! If you’re wearing those clothes for a bet, you’ve won…Your poetry is / for rent collectors rubbing their hands at your / sorry arrears … If you’re writing that shit for a bet, / you’ve won.”
Fran Lock’s new collection Hyena! (Poetry Bus Press, Ireland, €15) is her biggest and best collection yet, a series of vivid monologues and harangues by marginal voices, loners, outsiders and outcasts, surreal and subversive.
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ANDY CROFT rallies poets to the impossible task of speaking truth to a tin-eared politician
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
Author RACHEL HOLMES invites readers to come to her talk in London about the great foremother of the working-class women’s movement – Eleanor Marx
by Jude Price