Evidence of War: A response to Gaza
In a series of deeply empathic, figurative vignettes, Price bears distant witness to some of the countless harrowing episodes in the genocide visited on Gaza by Israel’s far right regime over the past two years.
ISBN 978-1-912710-98-0, 24pps, £10
Alan Price was prompted to compose these poetic responses on hearing in February 2025 of the ghoulish proposal by Trump and Netanyahu to supplant the diminished Palestinian population of Gaza with a ‘real estate’ colony, a Riviera built on the foundations of the rubble-buried bones of tens of thousands of Gazans.
In a series of deeply empathic, figurative vignettes, Price bears distant witness to some of the countless harrowing episodes in the genocide visited on Gaza by Israel’s far right regime over the past two years. The ravages of hunger in a now famine-stricken population are emphasized in Price’s evocative use of gustatory and olfactory images—orange, coffee, bread—phantom tastes and aromas of once-common produce now the stuff of gnawing nostalgia. In one poem, tears mingle with lentil soup in the absence of spices.
Evidence of War is a poetic intervention of Western conscience. It is not only an expression of empathy for the hundreds of thousands of displaced, famine-stricken and traumatised Palestinians, but also of the moral injury done to us all through vicarious witness to what many now refer to as history’s first ‘live-streamed genocide’.
