To rescue Kahlo from the clutches of the corporate art market, we need to acknowledge the overt and covert political dimensions of the work, demands GAVIN O’TOOLE
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by Patrick Cotter
If you can see past the relentless commodification you will be rewarded by enormously powerful work, suggests JENNY MITCHELL
CHRIS SEARLE revels in the one-off collaboration between an American polymath and a British Muslim, and detects the presence of their revolutionary forebear
GORDON PARSONS revels in an ebullient production of Shakespeare’s magical comedy
BRENT CUTLER welcomes a thoughtful analysis of the Erdogan regime, viewed through the evolving history of a neighbourhood in Istanbul
GORDON PARSONS regrets the price, but is dazzled by an outstandingly ambitious study of the way art restoration in particular, and culture in general was weaponised by the Nazis
No lyric ever stopped a tank – Seamus Heaney
From the moistened surface of my tongue
attend this crafted gift to instil faith.
No battle tank ever blocked a poem, no
armour-piercing round ever shattered
a stanza word by word. Architecture,
statuary, paintings, snared in the gaze
of a scope’s reticle, all fragment
to pounded dust. But phonemes, syllables,
glottal stops shard through brains smoother
than shrapnel. Poems, shielded by their lack
of atomic stuff, resist a Merkava’s
mortal, kinetic venom. Shoot and blast
and fire all you want, you cannot annihilate
the circulated thoughts of man, of woman;
not the kevlar-like thought of a lyric’s
reticulated words and beaded chimes.
Patrick Cotter lives in Cork. His latest book is Quality Control At The Miracle Factory (Dedalus Press, Dublin, 2025) www.patrickcotter.ie
Poetry submissions to thursdaypoems@gmail.com
