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.
Wolves Come Grovelling primarily challenges the paradoxes of British citizenship and subjecthood, democracy and monarchy, which have never been resolved, not even during the Republic of the 1650s—a period in our history which tends to be airbrushed out in spite of Hamo Thornycroft’s imposing bronze statue of Oliver Cromwell serving as permanent reminder outside Parliament since 1897.
But for all the pomp and majesty of the Coronation there is still the whispering hope of republicanism among sections of the British populace which may yet ripen and come to cast a significant shadow on this Second Carolean Age.
Morrison writes in a rich, Miltonic voice, heavy with anger and prophecy.
— Andy Croft
Wolves Come Grovelling, by Alan Morrison, 60 pps, ISBN 978-1-912710-57-7, available for £10 incl. p&p.
