By Alistair Findlay
Building Jerusalem: A Culture Matters Sampler 2016-26
Foreword by Mike Quille, Culture Matters, £15
This is more than a simple anthology: it demonstrates the strength of left movement poetry and its difference from the mainstream
All the poems in Building Jerusalem are of interest, including the weaker ones, because they are written from and for the left, and chosen and published by an established online sister magazine of the Morning Star, set up by the Communist Party’s cultural committee in 2016, and run ever since as a co-operative headed by Mike Quille to promote left-wing events and publications.
Culture Matters serves as both an outlet for already published writers, poets, essayists and cultural activists of all sorts, thus providing a nursery for new budding poets from the left of whatever age or generation mixed together. As Raymond Williams proposed, all culture needs to be understood as comprising three elements always in constant tension with each other: the residual (past), the dominant (mainstream present), and the emergent (future).
Jerusalem is named after William Blake’s epic poem regarding the ideological struggle — “mental fight” — needed to build a new international democratic socialist society through its literature, alongside the political struggle. The volume comprises a couple of poems taken from each of the 85 poetry collections it has published since 2016, when it published two, to 2025, when it published 14.
The front covers of each volume with their original designs, including the odd volume of short stories or plays, adds a further kaleidoscopic visual effect to the total mix.
Release the Sausages! Poems for Keir Starmer (edited by Andy Croft) contains only the names of poets approached but not prepared to write any poems about the man, including myself (though I did in the Morning Star). It spoke eloquently of the emptiness of Starmer’s persona as a politician, devoid of the human qualities still necessary to retain public trust.
In its own way, this reflects the increasing cultural confidence of the literary left, joking among ourselves about the catastrophic failure of the Labour right now desperately scrambling back towards the centre-right coronation of Burnham, a welcome pushback certainly, but a continuing catastrophic Labourist failure to admit the extent of the crisis as Corbyn tried to, fully seven years ago.
Building Jerusalem is a volume of poems written during the decade that witnessed Corbyn’s uplift, Starmer’s treachery, and now Burnham’s still dodgy pushback while talking hopefully about increasing military spending, bringing back conscription and rejoining the bankrupt Russophobic European Union.
What the broad left were actually writing about during the last decade, directly or indirectly, of current events or looking back historically at exemplary political moments, may be gauged even through some of the poem titles: ‘Goodbye Andy Capp’; ‘Diptych Drones’ (Jim Aitken); ‘On Being Asked To Imagine The Bronte Sister In The Modern Day’ (Jane Commane); ‘The Employed Poor’ (Martin Hayes).
Building Jerusalem is not just the “sampler” it claims to be of the 85 poetry collections published by Culture Matters over the last decade, but an anthology of left movement poems edited and curated by Alan Morrison, long-time editor of the online literary magazine The Recusant, and now part of a trio of volunteer Morning Star Thursday Poem editors and reviewers.
It is now part of what has recently become a small library of such anthologies since Andy Crofts’ Smokestack Lightening (2021) anthology appeared, drawing on the 200 left poetry books Smokestack has published since 2004. It joins too the anti-fascist international collection recently published, All in the Same Boat, Smokestack, ed Francis Combes, Andy Croft (2026), as well as Who We Are, 61 Morning Star Poems, ed Alistair Findlay (2025).
Collectively these offer Morning Star poetry editors not only sources to draw upon for the Thursday Poem slots or special commemorative political events but titles to offer to both younger and older budding poets, against which to measure their own work and learn from, and by means of which to recognise the differences between left movement poetry and the mainstream. This is not just in terms of literary techniques, so much as focus, subject, perspective, attitude, values, mood, invention, and not forgetting satire, anger etc.
Two of the poems mentioned earlier, those of Jane Commane and Martin Hayes, demonstrate the range of this collection. Hayes’ poem was published in 2018 on a topic still current and likely to remain so. Its form is as relevant as its content because it gives that content an added element of interest, newness, non-typicality of presentation, which a more typical poetic form might not have done. Thus, it is 25 lines long, the first line stretching across the width of the page with subsequent lines gradually reducing by a word or two until the final line, a single word “again.”
The poem is written entirely in lower case with no punctuation and might properly be rejected as prose if constructed in any other way. Its form gives it a visual density and unexpectedness despite the ordinariness of its language and application of repetition, whereas art poetry usually creates such density through the richness and texture or alliteration of language.
The energy and intensity that the form and layout generates — in respect of such a well-worn left literary trope as the working poor — is remarkable and may signal to other poets using more poetic language techniques how they might experiment further with such different forms and styles.
Building Jerusalem can be ordered here
A version of this article under the title ‘Ten glorious years of Culture Matters‘ first appeared in the Morning Star 7 November 2026
