GEOFF BOTTOMS relishes a profoundly human portrait of a family as it evolves across 55 years in Sheffield
21st Century Poetry with ANDY CROFT
New titles from Fran Lock, Richard Skinner, Tara Bergin and Mark A Murphy
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
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 welcomes the publication of an anthology of recent poems published by the Morning Star, and hopes it becomes an annual event
A ghost story by Mexican Ave Barrera, a Surrealist poetry collection by Peruvian Cesar Moro, and a manifesto-poem on women’s labour and capitalist havoc by Peruvian Valeria Roman Marroquin
ANDY CROFT rallies poets to the impossible task of speaking truth to a tin-eared politician
PATRICK JONES recommends a vital anthology from Afghan and Iranian poets where the political and personal fuse into witness-bearing and manifesto-making