Sacred Symphony is a new collection of poems on life in inner-city Dublin by Karl Parkinson, with images by Peter O'Doherty, ISBN: 978-1-912710-33-1
It is introduced by Father Peter McVerry, who writes this in the Introduction:
Those who are economically unproductive are considered a drain on the economy, undeserving of support. Those who are homeless, addicted or long-term unemployed are not just excluded from society, but unwanted by society.
Climate Matters: A collaboration between Riptide Journal and Culture Matters, edited and introduced by Virginia Baily, Sally Flint and Mike Quille
In 2019 we challenged writers and artists to address the burning topic of the climate crisis and question its relationship with capitalism. In 2020 Covid–19 erupted and spread across the world.
The whole of this anthology has been assembled under the on-going but ever-changing restrictions imposed by this pandemic, which has necessarily coloured the content in ways that we could not have foreseen when we put out the call for submissions.
From the Plough to the Stars: An Anthology of Working People’s Prose from Contemporary Ireland - outof print, EBOOK only
This is the follow-up volume to Children of the Nation: An Anthology of Working People's Poetry from Contemporary Ireland, published in 2019. Like that book, it aims to express working people's perspective on life. There are 50 contributions from the whole island of Ireland, driving home the fact that their life experience as working people is the same, no matter where on the island they live, on which side of the border, rural or urban, female or male, younger or older, writing in Irish or English.
Some snowmen had topknots. Some wore football scarves and skull caps. Some had veils over their faces. One had fairy wings. They all began to sing......
Snowfall, friendship and feelings combine in this heartfelt and celebratory story about coming together. There's a relatable and joyous sense of wonder as the snow starts and as the friends pull together to build their snowman. Filled with heart, hope and humanity, it is easy to imagine The Sikh Snowman becoming a firm favourite. - Jake Hope, Youth Libraries Group.
The Sikh Snowman, by Owen Gallagher with artwork by Fiona Stewart, ISBN 978-1-912710-29-4.
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.
Every year for the past five years, Culture Matters has run a Bread and Roses Poetry Award, supported by Unite the Union. The competition is free to enter and is aimed at supporting and encouraging poetry with a broadly social and political content, written by and for working people.
They Want All Our Teeth To Be Theirs is an anthology of some of the poems submitted, including the five winners of the Award. The poems cover the whole gamut of contemporary political vicissitudes and social injustices: the desperate plight of refugees; the indignity of unemployment and the exploitation in employment; homelessness; poverty; deindustrialisation; the solidarity of working people; the climate emergency; racism; and the redemptive solidarity of working people.
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.
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