We tend to think that feeding and watering our kids is enough. Job done. We’re so busy making a living ourselves that we gladly hand them over to schools and to social media, to be fed the mainstream culture.
But that culture broadly supports the status quo. It does not do enough to produce confident kids with an imaginative ability to challenge and change the status quo.
Organised around beautiful and careful observations of the natural world, Over Eagle Pond avoids the temptations of rage and despair that weaken so much Covid poetry, successfully addressing large, global events via the local and the particular. The accompanying drawings by Martin Gollan are reminiscent of Paul Hogarth and are the perfect complement to the poems.
– Andy Croft
Over Eagle Pond, poems by Chris Searle with drawings by Martin Gollan, ISBN 9-78-1-912710-42-3
Scotland’s radical credentials, past and present, are evident throughout the pages of this new anthology, the companion volume to the anthology of radical poetry, A Kist of Thistles, published in 2020. The first part of the anthology contains Memoirs, and the second part contains Flash Fiction with Short Stories.
This new poetry anthology is edited and introduced by Paul Summers and illustrated with photographs by Dan Douglas. Ten local poets are presented, diverse in style but unified by their progressive politics and class. Their visions of the city and its people straddle an epoch which has witnessed deindustrialisation and the dismantling of traditional working-class communities, and the transition to a more nuanced, multicultural and complex reality.
The anthology is sponsored by UNISON Newcastle City branch and Newcastle Trades Union Council.
Moya Roddy’s new collection of stories catapult us into the minds and hearts of working-class people who, despite a class system that offers them very little, reveal their own strength and potential through friendship, community and solidarity.
This is the final book in a set of three volumes of working people’s writing from contemporary Ireland. It follows on from a poetry anthology, Children of the Nation and a prose anthology, From the Plough to the Stars, all edited by Jenny Farrell and available here.
Gwrthryfel / Uprising takes us on a journey to the heart of Cymru. Edited by Merthyr writer Mike Jenkins, co-editor of ‘Red Poets’ magazine, with artwork by Gus Payne, this ambitious anthology of radical poetry explores Cymru’s history, hardships, rebellions and resistances. The book is sponsored by Merthyr Trades Council, the GMB union, and Left Unity Cymru.
This collection of beautifully illustrated love poems ranges from protesting the inequities and cruelties of our fragmenting world to delight in the variety and beauty of creation, and from a fierce compassion for the 'cry of the poor' to tender recollections of family and friends. These poems evince a radical empathy that lives electrically on the page.
Aitken’s poems are illustrated by Martin Gollan, whose dynamic penmanship carries a similar sense of energy and defiance. Gollan’s illustrations lend Aitken’s work an urgency and immediacy, emphasizing the poems’ enmeshment in the ever-changing political world.
It's an unsettling poetic riff on the 1963 film The Haunting, and the book that inspired it, The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, McCann’s poems traffic in the uncanny and the unsaid, merging moments from across the house’s long and morbid history into a single, though unstable, present. Just as Jackson’s novel is a story of frustrated passions and repressed pain, McCann’s poems also deal in the missing, the buried, the deliberately obscured.
This book is now available as a pamphlet, ISBN 978-1-912710-58-4.
Thirty poems in various forms and styles—rhyme, blank verse, free verse, villanelle, and ‘villanelle-vague’—tackle the seismic events and vicissitudes of recent years: Brexit, Grenfell and the “hostile environment”, the proroguing of Parliament, Boris Johnson’s shambolic premiership, Covid and the lockdowns, “Partygate”, Trump’s insurrection, the resistible rise of Keir Starmer, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Platinum Jubilee, the JUST STOP OIL protests, the death of Elizabeth Windsor and the suppression of republican expression during the mourning period, and the Coronation.
Martin Hayes has long been one of the most prolific and original poets of labour writing in this country. In Machine / Language he further details our descent into enmeshment with the apparatus of our oppression: an oppression that functions legally through the economic exercise of state power, and intellectually, through the operation of language. Within neoliberal society personal identity becomes fused at the bone to our economic output; we are swallowed whole by our designation as workers and compelled to identify with a system that slowly destroys us. In this regard Machine / Language can be read in a number of ways: as a document of struggle, an aesthetic meditation, an act of solidarity, and a mode of resistance.
The mission of Culture Matters is to promote cultural democracy. This means providing articles and works of art for people whose views and voices go largely ignored by the ruling classes of late capitalist Britain. We aim to be a platform where the oppressed and exploited can develop and express their own intellectual and artistic output.
In the summer of 2023 no minority was more brusquely and effectively suppressed than republicans. Our new anthology, Dungheap Cockerel, has been created in a few weeks to counter that injustice with satires on monarchy in general and its latest incumbent in particular. It is available as a free downloadable pdf in the Poetry section, and we have also printed a few books.
Yer Ower Voices! is an anthology of dialect poetry in Welsh and English. The book is divided by geographical regional dialects: Swansea, The Valleys, Cardiff/ Newport, and North & West Wales. It is the first anthology of its kind ever published.
The poems in Rebel Admin are visually intense, and syntactically jagged; they create a sort of fragmentary cinema, one that works to signal the irrational absurdity of neoliberal culture, but also to disrupt its plausibly smooth and continuously scrolling script.
- David Harsent
'Alan Humm's poised and poignant debut collection illuminates, with laser accuracy, ‘the dark shape in your heart/that comes to claim you as its own'. Here is first love, paternal love, spiritual love, the love for friends and for shared music – the songs that can change you and yet still take you back to who you once were. Above all, Humm understands the cost of love: loss, grief, yearning, the love that doesn't satisfy and doesn't comfort. The love that, as he adapts Yeats in his own new version of Byzantium, 'makes a country for old men'.
Farid Bitar's Testament / Sajél, as its title suggests, is a testament to our tempestuous times, taking in the seismic events and vicissitudes of the past few years, including the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020-22, and the Black Lives Matter movement in response to the death of George Floyd. But perhaps unsurprisingly, the current and agonisingly ongoing Israeli seige of Gaza, and mass displacement of Gazans, which some term the second Palestinian catastrophe or Nakba, dominates this collection.
Anyone familiar with Wayne’ Dean-Richards’ work will recognise the themes in Money & Blood, chief among them being, as the title suggests, money and blood. The corrupting power of capitalism and its tragic, often violent consequences can be seen throughout the book.
These are polemical and activist poems written to predict and hasten the demise of our tottering government and—hopefully—of the Conservative Party itself. The present-day Tory party and its leading representatives are unequalled in their incompetence, arrogance, greed, mendacity, corruption, and systemic criminality.
The past fourteen years of Conservative rule have surpassed even the Thatcher period in terms of the social, cultural, and economic damage inflicted on the vast majority of ordinary people, especially the poor, the sick and the homeless.
On the 40th anniversary of the 1984/5 Miners’ Strike, William Hershaw has used the series of Christian images of the Stations of the Cross (Christ’s journey to his crucifixion) as a imaginative framework for a series of poems about the Strike, and particularly the Battle of Orgreave on the18th June, 1984.
What makes people change their mind and their behaviour? It happens all the time, often in small but significant ways. In his first collection of short stories, Dermot Foster deftly brings out the variety and subtlety of the ‘turning points’ in our lives.
The stories are marked by vivid characterisation, fluent dialogue and mature psychological insights into the politics of personal relationships. We hope they raise awareness of turning points in your own life, and the lives of the people around you, and we hope they inspire you to making personal and political changes.
Turning Points by Dermot Foster, ISBN 9781912710607
Red in tooth and claw: that is one way of characterising nature, but by no means the only way. Dog eat dog: that is one way of characterising the culture of our conflicted species, but again not the only way.
The poems in Sapling & Wood explore aspects of nature and culture from the standpoint of the poet’s own experience, aided by relatives and friends, and by other authors, notably William Blake and Walt Whitman.
Illustrations from a variety of sources, including friends’ artwork, enliven the text, and a prose commentary by the poet preambles each of the four sections into which the book is divided, namely “Kith”, “Kin”, “Enmities & Reconciling”, and “Word Over All”.
Here is a sample poem from the collection:
Peter Raynard’s heroic crown of sonnets after William Hogarth’s (1697–1764) of A Harlot’s Progress (1731) and A Rake’s Progress (1733) runs the same gamut of moral and social concerns but bring a contemporary socialist sensibility to bear on the interconnected fates of Tom Rakewell and Moll Hackabout. Raynard uses the connected but very different downfalls of Tom and Moll to interrogate the complexities of ‘choice’, the notion of complicity and the limits of our sympathy. Do we pity Tom Rakewell, now become a Tom O’ Bedlam, repenting in a madhouse? Do we pity Moll, beating rope in Bridewell Prison? Or dead in ‘the cold dark ground where a pauper’s/ place may be found’? What seems telling is that Moll is bereft of even sincere mourners, punished, as Raynard writes for ‘a simple dream to simply exist’ with only her madam upset by her passing.
In 21 pieces about a variety of urban and rural locations in England, Scotland and Wales, Charlie Hill takes us on a tour of post-industrial Britain. From escaping to the Highlands during the pandemic to a trip to a Soho boozer, from camping in a church in Herefordshire to playing football in inner-city Birmingham, from feeling twitchy in a Gwynedd resort town to a run-in with the builders of HS2, This Albion draws on the theories of the Situationists and the writing of Mark Fisher to create an original and accessible snapshot of a society divided and brought together by geography and class.
Charlie Hill has been longlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story prize 2024.
This Albion: Snapshots of a Compromised Land, by Charlie Hill, ISBN 9781912710744
The anthology is a selection of poems submitted for the sixth Bread and Roses Poetry Award 2024. It includes the five winners of the Award and the poems cover a variety of themes relevant to working-class life, experience, history and culture. What unites them is an often playful, yet deeply considered engagement with language, and a fresh focus on the particularities of working-class life. Above all else, the poems are bound together by a generous expression of solidarity with the most vulnerable amongst us.
The Role of the Artist under Late Capitalism: the Bread and Roses Poetry Award Anthology 2024, ISBN: 9781912710722
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