WILL STONE fact-checks the colourful life of Ozzy Osbourne
Freedom Poems for Ocalan and collections by Michael Rosen and Fred Voss
Chronicler of the absurd: Michael Rosen
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
FREEDOM Poems for Ocalan (Peace in Kurdistan, £4) is an international book of poems written for the 70th birthday of the Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan, imprisoned in Turkey since his abduction in 1999.
Among the British poets are James Kelman, Maxine Peake, Greta Sykes and Doug Nicholls and, in the words of one contributor: “If we took up the struggle, more or less,/only on the infallibly favourable chance of success,/ History would be very easy to make.”
It’s worth buying alone for the poem by Gaelic poet Aonghas MacNeacail, in which he writes: “though you are surrounded/by a solid stone rampart,/and though you see no blue sky… your cause is a fertile forest/where your story is a narrative/among branches, twigs and buds… as you rise like the dove of freedom.”
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
