WILL STONE fact-checks the colourful life of Ozzy Osbourne
AMIR DARWISH is a British-Syrian poet of Kurdish origin who came to this country as an asylum-seeker during the second Gulf war, hanging underneath a lorry on a cross-channel ferry.
In his second full-length collection Dear Refugee, Darwish seeks to rescue refugees from the media images of perpetrators or victims and he reflects on the suffering of the world’s 22 million refugees, what they have left behind, what they have lost and where they have arrived:
“Be thankful to the roads, Their stones as they lie before you/To the sky that generously shows you/The moon dangling its legs in your eyes,/Say thank you to nature, to the rivers who feed/The earth to feed you,/Be thankful to life and earth/When they knock open your heart.”

ANDY CROFT rallies poets to the impossible task of speaking truth to a tin-eared politician


