CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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21st-century poetry
Latest collections from Farid Bitar, Simon Haines, Michael Crowley and Martin Hayes
RESPONDING TO THE NEWS: Simon Haines
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
JAMIE BRITTON recommends this fine analysis of the architectural, ecological and infrastructural destruction of the Gaza Strip
THE title poem of Farid Bitar’s Screaming Olives (Smokestack, £8.99) is about the million Palestinian olive trees cut down by the Israeli authorities and settlers since 1967 in order to ruin the Palestinian economy and uproot Palestinian culture.
These are poems about a country that no longer exists but refuses to die. They are about occupation, resistance and resilience and are a demand for the right of return for the five million Palestinians living in exile.
Bitar — who has lived in exile for 40 years — connects the story of his “stolen homeland” to stories of oppression and injustice everywhere: “Emmett Till lynched in 1955/Way down near Selma Alabama/Ali on Grill, the settler taunted/Burned in Duma-West Bank-Palestine in 2015/ Mississippi still.”
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JAN WOOLF invigilates images that meditate on Palestine, and the people who witness them
TONY FOX reports from a commemoration of the legendary Battle of Jarama in which four Stockton-on-Tees volunteers fell
JONATHAN TAYLOR attempts to disentangle the mind, self and political opinions of a successful bourgeois novelist
Olive oil remains a vital foundation of food, agriculture and society, storing power in the bonds of solidarity. Though Palestinians are under attack, they continue to press forward write ROX MIDDLETON, LIAM SHAW and MIRIAM GAUNTLETT