CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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If we must have a Poet Laureate, then let it be Simon Armitage
His new book reveals him to be one of our most inventive and popular poets
Tour guide to the contemporary world: Simon Armitage
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 CONTINUED existence of the Poet Laureateship in the 21st century is an embarrassing anachronism, just like the continued existence of the monarchy.
Some of our best poets have publicly refused to have anything to do with the job. Adrian Mitchell said he would only consider the role if he was allowed to “tap-dance on the coffin at every royal funeral” and Tony Harrison once wrote a long poem disqualifying himself from the job of “rat-catcher to our present queen.”
And Benjamin Zephaniah has said that he “does not need to go via the church, the state, or the monarchy to reach my people.”
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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
KEN COCKBURN relishes the memoir of a translator, but wonders whether the autobiography underlying the impulse would make a better book
ALAN MORRISON celebrates life and work of the late Tony Harrison, 1937-2025
ANDY CROFT rallies poets to the impossible task of speaking truth to a tin-eared politician