JAMIE BRITTON recommends that we all buy at least two copies of a remarkable book of poems
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Cardowan Colliery, North Lanarkshire
by Finola Scott
MARIA DUARTE goes down a bilingual rabbit hole with an impressive Jodie Foster
DAVID HARVIE recommends a selection of Harry Cleaver’s writing that documents working-class activism and offers a method, and a way of understanding and investigating the world
DAVID YEARSLEY is fascinated by the account of four composers who transformed their experiences of the second world war and the Holocaust into deeply moving works of art
PETER MASON thrills to the sound of south London-born Yussef Dayes, and the galaxy of musicians drawn into his orbit
From post-human revolution in Puerto Rico to trans poetics and queer mythmaking, these three books that imagine new ways of being together
My rubble-full garden’s no use for digging,
I don’t dare go deep. At times I hear canaries
cheep for breath, bogies rattle rails, bent men
cough for sunlight at end of days.
In the church car park, traffic in shifts
charts the day. Flower Arranging, Choir Practice,
Wedding-hatted women, lads in fierce pride kilts.
Floodlights keep the dark in its place.
Tarmac over pit-propped caverns, shaky hollows,
greedy snaking tunnels. The dead recorded
in the new estate roads where salaried men drive home,
hands soft and clean, music playing.
Similar stories
ALAN MORRISON recommends a consummate, heart-warming collection about a working-class upbringing in the industrial north-east
RUTH AYLETT reviews two collections of outright political poetry
by Christopher Norris
The Labour Party proposal to scrap benefits for those unable to work will be debated in Parliament next Tuesday, and threatens the most vulnerable in our society. ALAN MORRISON presents some responses in poetry