Andy Croft
Footprints, songs and elegies in a bumper Smokestack crop
Wednesday 29 May 2013
Peter Blackman (1909-1993) was one of the early pioneers of Black-British poetry.
Reaching for My Gnu: Poetry By Anna Chen
Friday 10 May 2013
Fire Words, the national anthology of school students' poetry I compiled some time ago, included two incendiary poems written by a young teenage Hackney poet called Anna Chen.
Northern lights which illuminate places and people
Thursday 02 May 2013
"If you are an alien, how come you sound like you're from the north?" Dr Who's assistant once asked Christopher Ecclestone.
Images of May Day
Wednesday 01 May 2013
A selection of verse which celebrates international workers' day, when 'the green earth rejoices in the bud and the blossom of May'
Poetic pamphlets that punch well above their weight
Wednesday 27 March 2013
A slim poetry pamphlet can sometimes pack more of a punch than any breezeblock collected works.
Ideas dance in this news from nowhere
Thursday 28 February 2013
Bill Herbert has produced two astonishingly inventive collections
Smokestack's telling trio
Wednesday 23 January 2013
The radical Italian poet Rocco Scotellaro (1923-53) grew up in the impoverished and mountainous Italian south. He was active in the post-war struggle for land reform until his election as socialist mayor of Tricarico brought him into conflict with local landowners.
Poetry of the year
Wednesday 19 December 2012
The Star's 21st-century poetry reviews editor Andy Croft gets the low-down from fellow poets on the collections which have most impressed in 2012
The bitter heritage of broken land
Monday 28 November 2011
Two new collections with a northern and Scottish perspective
Pirates, black stockings and Russian cigarettes
Wednesday 13 October 2010
Steve Spence's first full-length collection A Curious Shipwreck (Shearsman, £8.95) is a book about pirates, real and imagined - Long John Silver, Radio Caroline, file-share piracy, Pirate Jenny, Adam and the Ants, Romeo and Ethel (the pirate's daughter) and Desert Island Discs ("Now if you had to choose only / one of these eight pirates to take / on your desert island, / which one would it be?")