GABRIELE NEHER draws attention to an astoundingly skilled Flemish painter who defied the notion that women cannot paint like men
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Neither here nor there
Two accomplished collections from Grace Nichols and Louisa Adjoa Parker explore what it means to live between two worlds
VIVIDLY DESCRIPTIVE: Louisa Adjoa Parker
[Maisie Hill]
The Bard pays homage to Hull’s finest promoter and venue, and awards Douze Points to Laibach
KEVIN DONNELLY outlines how the bourgeois institutions inhibit our ability to to view art in revolutionary ways, and suggests some tactics to overturn it
ANDY HEDGECOCK welcomes an accessible - and optimistic - take on our relationship to new technology
JOHN GREEN suggests that a new, biased, and highly readable re-hash of the story of the Cambridge Five be taken with a large pinch of salt
BRENT CUTLER welcomes a timely reminder of the long history of protests and the outdoor spaces in which they takes place
GRACE NICHOLS’ beautiful new collection Passport to Here and There (Bloodaxe, £9.95) is a kind of autobiography in verse.
The first part is about growing up in Guyana, where Nichols meets the ghost of her childhood, “running/with slipping shoulder-straps/and half-plaited hair/beside a brown expanse/of memorising water/and the mellow faces of wooden houses/half-hidden by a weave/of coconut, mango, guenip trees.”
There are some perfect poems here about adolescence, notably Confirmation, Spirit Rising and Sweet Fifteen: “If the leaves of my memory serve me — /That was the year my hair went beehive/the year of the kiss, touching smugly/in the mirror my bee-stung lips.”
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PETER MASON welcomes collected writings from Britain’s first black female publisher that focus on the place of black writers in literature
ANDY CROFT welcomes the publication of an anthology of recent poems published by the Morning Star, and hopes it becomes an annual event
KEVIN DONNELLY accepts the invitation to think speculatively in contemplation of representations of people of African descent in our cultural heritage
GORDON PARSONS is enthralled by an erudite and entertaining account of where the language we speak came from