GEOFF BOTTOMS relishes a profoundly human portrait of a family as it evolves across 55 years in Sheffield
Class reproduction
RUTH AYLETT admires the blunt honesty with which a woman’s experience is recorded, but detects the unexamined privilege that underlies it
PAUL DONOVAN applauds an excellently crafted new musical that explores the life and death of Ruth Ellis
PAUL DONOVAN is tickled by the excruciating take-downs of one of the funniest, wittiest, political writers around.
RON JACOBS points out, via a transcription of Kissinger’s secret recordings, that Trump could never have existed without Nixon and Kissinger
ELLIS RAE is persuaded that the advantages of the ‘talking cure’ are superior to the treatment of mental illness with drugs
JOHN GREEN, MICHAL BONCZA and BELLA KATZ review The Good Boy, Broken English, and Don't Be Prey
Swell
Maria Ferguson, Penguin, £10.99
ALL poetry must come in some way from the personal experience of the person who writes it, but using your own life directly as raw material is very much the way many poets write currently. In Swell, Maria Ferguson presents a chunk of her life, from lovers and singledom through a miscarriage, to a successful pregnancy and a child.
Feminists argue that “the personal is political” — that patriarchy and gender-oppression are illuminated through the specific details of a woman’s life; and that a woman’s body is as fit a topic for poetry as nature or romantic love. These are also topics that allow women readers to feel their own experience is seen and valued. How far does Swell meet these objectives?
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by Maria Ferguson