RITA DI SANTO draws attention to a new film that features Ken Loach and Jeremy Corbyn, and their personal experience of media misrepresentation
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Winning hearts and minds beats a corporate gong any day
21st century poetry with Andy Croft
JULIA TOPPIN recommends Patti Smith’s eloquent memoir that wrestles with the beauty and sorrow of a lifetime
MARJORIE MAYO welcomes an account of family life after Oscar Wilde, a cathartic exercise, written by his grandson
KEN COCKBURN guides us through a survey of Chekov’s early short fiction, and the groundwork it laid for his later masterpieces
ANDY HEDGECOCK revels in a hugely enjoyable but deadly serious examination of the 1930s, that is an indictment of our own era
The bard distills our hellish times into fiery words
HAVE you ever noticed how the word “poet” is increasingly accompanied by the automatic prefix “award-winning”?
National Poetry Day — when a panel of award-winning poets give an award to an award-winning poet — is no longer a celebration of poetry but of the PR machinery of corporate publishers.
As poet and publisher Michael Schmidt has argued: “Poetry prizes are now the vehicle of literary reception. Control the prizes and you control the culture of reception.”
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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
ANDY CROFT rallies poets to the impossible task of speaking truth to a tin-eared politician
KEN COCKBURN assesses the art of Ian Hamilton Finlay for the experience of warfare it incited and represents
PATRICK JONES recommends a vital anthology from Afghan and Iranian poets where the political and personal fuse into witness-bearing and manifesto-making