CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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21st-century poetry
Latest collections from Culture Matters, Fran Lock, Jay Bernard and Chris Nash
Rebooting the saints: Fran Lock
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
FOR anyone unexcited by the news that the Forward prize for the best first collection has just been given to a book of poems about playing Super Mario, four important new books of poetry about things that matter might stir the spirits.
As Rob Walton puts it in the collection Release a Rage of Red (Culture Matters, £5): “Write poems on the tins you put in the foodbank/Write verse about how foodbank even became a word/Write about alternatives to foodbanks… Write about writing a Closed sign on the last foodbank.”
The collection is the third anthology of entries to the annual Unite-sponsored Bread and Roses award. Edited by Mike Quille, the book is a furious reply to the insular and trivial narcissism of so much of the contemporary British poetry scene.
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