To rescue Kahlo from the clutches of the corporate art market, we need to acknowledge the overt and covert political dimensions of the work, demands GAVIN O’TOOLE
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Poetry round-up 2022 with ANDY CROFT
As usual at this time of year poets talk about the books of poetry they have most enjoyed reading in the last 12 months
If you can see past the relentless commodification you will be rewarded by enormously powerful work, suggests JENNY MITCHELL
CHRIS SEARLE revels in the one-off collaboration between an American polymath and a British Muslim, and detects the presence of their revolutionary forebear
GORDON PARSONS revels in an ebullient production of Shakespeare’s magical comedy
BRENT CUTLER welcomes a thoughtful analysis of the Erdogan regime, viewed through the evolving history of a neighbourhood in Istanbul
GORDON PARSONS regrets the price, but is dazzled by an outstandingly ambitious study of the way art restoration in particular, and culture in general was weaponised by the Nazis
David Constantine
THE book of poems I’ve been most moved by this year is John Foggin’s Pressed for Time (Calder Valley Poetry). It’s a very various collection, locally rooted but far-reaching in its ramifications.
Its urgency is there in the title: so much still wants saying, saying again, out of one man’s life and addressing the general good but also the ills, the accelerating drift towards social undoing.
The injunction, spoken or not, of one poem after another is: Attend! So much beauty, so much love, want their due attention. Attend, before it’s too late, to their fragility, to the threats.
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ANDY CROFT welcomes the publication of an anthology of recent poems published by the Morning Star, and hopes it becomes an annual event
RUTH AYLETT reviews two collections of outright political poetry
KEN COCKBURN relishes the memoir of a translator, but wonders whether the autobiography underlying the impulse would make a better book
JONATHAN TAYLOR attempts to disentangle the mind, self and political opinions of a successful bourgeois novelist