MICK MCSHANE is roused by a band whose socialism laces every line of every song with commitment and raw passion
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NICANOR PARRA: A polymath who reconfigured the landscape of Latin American poetry
New releases from Mountain, Soul Asylum and Michael McDermott
ALEX HALL is disgusted by the misuse of ‘emotional narratives’ to justify uninformed geo-political prejudice
SUE TURNER welcomes a thoughtful, engaging book that lays bare the economic realities of global waste management
JOHN GREEN welcomes an insider account of the achievements and failures of the transition to democracy in Portugal
SIMON PARSONS applauds an imaginative and absorbing updating of Strindberg’s classic
PETER MASON is enthralled by an assembly of objects, ancient and modern, that have lain in the mud of London’s river
CHILEAN poet Nicanor Parra, who died recently aged 103, repeatedly scared the Nobel Prize for Literature bureaucracy shitless. It invented lame excuses every time somebody had him nominated and his name went forward on four occasions.
But his prestige was never in doubt with his millions of readers throughout Latin America and beyond.
The oldest of eight siblings in a prolific artistic family — a sister was the legendary singer Violeta Parra — he was a true polymath but the only child the family could afford to educate.
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