New Reviews Felix Cassiel on Andy Green's This Noise Is Free and
Alan Morrison on two new Shoestring collections by Andy Croft and Alexis Lykiard
Alan Morrison on Geoffrey Heptonstall's The Rites of Paradise
New Reviews Dave Russell on James Joyce
Dave Russell on Duane Voorhees' Gift – God Runs Through All These Rooms
Felix Cassiel on Victoria Bean's Liberties
Felix Cassiel on Richard Skinner's Terrace
Felix Cassiel on Francis Combes' If The Symptoms Persist
Felix Cassiel on Goran Simić's New and Selected Sorrows
Alan Morrison on Amir Darwish's Dear Refugee and Fiona Sinclair's Slow Burner
Alan Morrison on Stephen Sawyer's There Will Be No Miracles Here
Alan Morrison on Bernard Saint's Roma and Michael Crowley's First Fleet
Leon Brown on Mike Leigh's Peterloo (2018)
Jenny Farrell's Marxist Reading of Wuthering Heights
New Fred Russell on The Roots of Racism
New Marx & Morry David Betteridge on reading Karl Marx
Alan Morrison on Andy Croft's Letters To Randall Swingler
Alan Morrison on Ian Parks' Citizens
Dave Russell on Stevie James' A Lonely Man Circling the Earth
Kevin Saving on A Quiet Passion, Deaths of the Poets and The Bughouse:
the poetry, politics and madness of Ezra Pound
Reviews Alan Morrison on Bruce Harris's Kaleidoscope
Alan Morrison on Andy Willoughby's Between Stations
Alan Morrison on Larry Beckett's Paul Bunyan
Dave Russell on Wendy Young's The Dream of Somewhere Else
New Poems Elaine Cusack, Charles March III, Keith Moul,
Tom Kelly, Roger Ettenfield, Douglas Penick, Stephen Kingsnorth,
Tanner, Rudy Baron, Steve Pottinger, Ilhem Issaoui, Alan Price,
Fiona Sinclair, Ken Simpson, Sam Silva, Jim Morris, Keith Armstrong
Eduard Schmidt-Zorner, Rachel Hegarty, Liam O'Neill, Alan O'Brien,
Fred Johnston, David Butler, Moya Roddy, Michael Lee Johnson, Patrick Bolger
Francis Devine, Alan Weadick, Andrew Barnes, Bernard Saint, Michael H. Brownstein
it is wrong ... to imagine that the currently fashionable and approved constitutes the work of permanent importance Alan Bold (1970)
Modern English polite society...
seems to me as corrupt as consciousness of culture and absence of honesty can make it. A canting, lie-loving, fact-hating, scribbling, chattering, wealth-hunting, pleasure-hunting, celebrity-hunting mob
George Bernard Shaw
An Unsocial Socialist (1883)
The want of poetical power is the impelling force in the case of most versifiers. They would fain be poets, and imagine that the best way is to try to write poetry and to publish what they write. They will never see their mistake. Equus asinus still believes that the possession of an organ of noise is sufficient, with a little practice, to enable him to sing like a nightingale.
John Davidson (1857 – 1909)
Australia, Austria, Canada, England, France, Germany, Hungary, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Mexico, New Zealand, Poland, Puerto Rico, Russia, Scotland, Serbia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Syria, Tasmania, Tunisia, Ukraine, USA, Wales, Zimbabwe
oppositional poetry, prose, polemic
AXIS OF SHAME
It is necessary for the socialist poet to have
more impressive technical equipment than his
apolitical contemporaries because his task is that much more important.
Alan Bold
Recusant
...AND YET SHE IS BRINGING HER SHAMBOLIC 'DEAL' BACK TO PARLIAMENT EVEN THOUGH IT WAS REJECTED BY THE LARGEST DEFEAT IN BRITISH POLITICAL HISTORY...
MILITANT
BORIS'S ROGUE GOVERNMENT
ONLY NINE MONTHS IN AND BORIS JOHNSON'S TORY GOVERNMENT HAS GONE ROGUE
THE UK HAS THE HIGHEST RATE OF FATALITIES FROM COVID IN EUROPE WITH OVER 60,000 CITIZENS HAVING LOST THEIR LIVES
CARE HOMES WERE EFFECTIVELY LEFT TO FEND FOR THEMSELVES
EVEN NOW 'TEST AND TRACE' ISN'T UP TO SCRATCH
AND ON THE CONTINUING SHAMBLES OF BREXIT, JOHNSON HAS NOW BROKEN INTERNATIONAL LAW BY UNILATERALLY REWRITING PART OF THE WITHDRAWAL AGREEMENT HE HIMSELF BROKERED AND SPURIOUSLY SOLD TO THE ELECTORATE IN DECEMBER 2019 AS "OVEN READY"; BY DOING SO, NOT ONLY HAS HE SHOWN HIS CONTEMPT FOR THE BRITISH ELECTORATE, HE HAS ALSO IRREVOCABLY TARNISHED THE UK'S INTERNATIONAL REPUTATION FOR STRAIGHT DEALING
JUST HOW MUCH MORE INCOMPETENCE AND GROSS NEGLIGENCE DOES THIS COUNTRY HAVE TO PUT UP WITH FROM THIS CHARLATAN PRIME MINISTER AND HIS MALTHUSIAN PARTY...?
THE RECUSANT IS ALMOST BACK TO NORMAL FUNCTIONING NOW FOLLOWING THE TRANSITION PERIOD OF MOONFRUIT TO A NEW CONTENT PROVIDER. WE ARE IN THE PROCESS OF REFORMATTING 13 YEARS' WORTH OF ARCHIVED MATERIAL SO THAT ALL PAGES CAN BE FULLY NAVIGABLE USING V6 PAGE LENGTHENING FUNCTIONS WHICH WILL MEAN EVENTUALLY ALL PAGES CAN BE READ BY SIMPLY USING THE SIDE BAR RATHER THAN THE TEXT BOX ARROWS AS BEFORE.
Recusant
the
BORIS THE MORAL ABOMINATION
"Let the bodies pile high!" says our unscrupulous prime minister... well they already have, 150,000 to date! Cummings: “Tens of thousands of people died who didn’t need to die.” How can Johnson remain prime minister under such a cloud of suspicion?
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