Skip to main content
21st-century poetry
Reviews of latest collections from Alan Morrison, Kevin Higgins, Graham Fulton, RF Francis and James Womack

“O WHAT hope for red roses/To grow among the thorns of red-top-hypnotised, populist-/Supporting proles, working-class Faragistes, Workington/‘Gammons’, purple-rinse reactionaries, blue collar/Conservatives, proletarian Tories (Old Benjamin Disraeli’s/Angels in Marble coming back to haunt us through/Poltergeist psephologists, now Boris’s blue collars, his batmen/Bootscrapers)...”

So begins Alan Morrison’s new epic poem Anxious Corporals (Smokestack Books, £7.99).

It’s an extraordinary essay in verse about education and class, deference and independence, reason and reaction, the victory of shopkeeper values and the defeat of the postwar consensus.

The 95th Anniversary Appeal
Support the Morning Star
You have reached the free limit.
Subscribe to continue reading.
Similar stories
A memorial to the International Brigades that took part in the Battle of Caspe on the Aragon front in March 1938. Caspe is a town in the province of Zaragoza. The memorial was designed by Maribel Loren Ros and unveiled in 2018 / Pic: Fran Ara/CC
Poetry / 17 July 2026
17 July 2026

On the 90th anniversary of the outbreak of the Spanish civil war, ALAN MORRISON selects some poems from a new anthology

boix
Literature / 22 June 2026
22 June 2026

From post-human revolution in Puerto Rico to trans poetics and queer mythmaking, these three books that imagine new ways of being together

covers
Best of 2025 / 2 January 2026
2 January 2026

Looking for moral co-ordinates after a tough year for rational political thinking and shared human morality

covers
Round-up / 3 January 2026
3 January 2026

Looking for moral co-ordinates after a tough year for rational political thinking and shared human morality