A word on the title. Airtins doesn’t mean metallic food or drink containers which have become airborne or – emptied of their contents – now hold only air. Airtins is a Scots…
Martin Hayes – Four Poems
Disneyland, Paris the CEO has told the supervisorsthat they need to find outwho it waswho while in the lift with the potential new clientssaid, ‘here we goup to Mickey Mouse land again’and…
Robert Etty – Four Poems
ORGAN RECITAL A heart can beat only so many times,Jane’s dentist announces, probing her gum,and, while it’s in mind, lists other organsnone of us ought to take for granted. Jane and her…
DEEP ART: A Q&A WITH ANTHONY HOWELL
CHAINLINK: On the spine of your book-length poem Autumn, where the publisher’s name and/or logo would usually be, it says “Manubook”, which I take to mean a manuscript presented bound and with…
REVIEW: Autumn by Anthony Howell (Manubook) – Neil Fulwood
It would be erroneous – and stupid – to say that cracking the spine on Anthony Howell’s Autumn is as daunting as settling down (or, equally, squaring up) to The Odyssey or…
Ruth Shelton: Three seasonal poems
In the Beginning Star begins the songbreaking her strings from untimed waitingagitating the void, calling along constellations, grazing unknown suns.Chords gather, surge with the tides, grating,rattling the shore, breaking into runs to…
REVIEW: Full Body Reclaim by Caroline Stancer (Five Leaves) – Neil Fulwood
An established figure on the East Midlands literary scene as one half (with Birgit Friedrich) of the poetry collective Dandelions, Caroline Stancer makes her publishing debut with Full Body Reclaim, a handsomely…
OWEN GALLAGHER – THREE POEMS
‘BATMAN AND BATWOMAN ROB THE POUNDSTRETCHER STORE!’ We could set up a graffiti school,get commissions from gangs, let students practicein the basement car park before allocating billboards, churches, banks. We could start…
Caroline Stancer – Three Poems
WAITING FOR THE RAPTURE When I visit I walk throughcorridors created by everything from your mother’s flat(she was a hoarder too). The sealed boxesare draped with clothes,empty cans, takeaway containers full of…
FAR FROM NOTTINGHAM: THE INSIDE TRACK ON ALAN SILLITOE’S THE GENERAL – Neil Fulwood
Although well-received in some quarters (“Sillitoe scores a hat trick” – Punch), The General confounded many people. Highly anticipated after the one-two of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of…
ANDY CROFT’S ESCAPE TO MORIBUNDIA: AN EXCERPT
Forthcoming from Broken Sleep in 2027, Andy Croft’s Escape to Moribundia is a verse-novel in Pushkin sonnets. A black comedy about the colonisation of the Future, a study in Hauntology and a…
THE SIGNAL-BOX BY NEIL ‘DICKY’ FULWOOD
“Hallo!” The word came out of the fog, followed only a second or two later by thevague outline of the man who had shouted it, the more substantial outline of abuilding of…
Neil Fulwood: Two Poems
DIET This is where I am right now, feeling likeI’m in some loose-limbed American poemby one of those hard-living American poets.Mentioning no names, but … those poets,who casually toss their cookiesin the…
LEAFE PRESS: Alan Baker your guide.
LEAFE PRESS Leafe Press publishes poetry, mainly of the modernist / post-modernist variety. It’s a 21st century press and a digital press; it was founded in April 2000 with a launch at…
ROSS WILSON: THREE POEMS
The Great Stink ‘But the Dragon was loose at the time . . .No one had challenged him lately . . .He got to our part of the world; nobody saw him…
ANTHONY OWEN: POEM ‘Hurricane Benjamin’
In the heart of a stolen starWe are back to wigwams againNames on limbs just incase it comesHurricane Benjamin destroyer of tents,Destroyer of children and whole bloodlines. Fuck it, lets get back…
HALF A CENTURY AGO … Ross Bradshaw
Fifty years is a long time in politics… and it was fifty years ago that four young anti-militarists in Aberdeen were arrested under the arcane charge of Incitement to Disaffection. I was…
ANGELA TOPPING: THREE POEMS
REGRETS He likes to see the faint blue smokestream into darkness as he says farewell.He relishes the paper’s acceptance of flame:a mystic kiss from tender whispered match. He stuffs in remnants of…
ALAN MORRISON ON THE ALDERBANK WADE
(Adapted from the Preface to The Alderbank Wade) I first developed a fascination with the political and religious nuances surrounding the English Civil War, or as it is termed in Marxian historicism, the English Revolution, and…
REVIEW: The Alderbank Wade by Alan Morrison (Culture Matters) – Neil Fulwood
Read any good verse novels lately? Personally, I can’t think of anything truly outstanding in that most challenging of verse forms since Robin Robertson’s The Long Take, published seven years ago, and Anne…
REVIEW: Yours Cruelly, Elvira: Memoirs of the Mistress of the Dark by Cassandra Peterson (Hachette) – Neil Fulwood
Cassandra Peterson has had quite the life. Bullying mother. Rough diamond father. Traumatic childhood accident (pan; boiling water). Socially awkward. Suddenly voluptuous. Go-go dancer in her mid-teens. Showgirl while still a good…
ME AND ARTHUR SEATON: A PERSONAL ODYSSEY THROUGH SATURDAY NIGHT AND SUNDAY MORNING: Neil Fulwood
There had been working class novels before. But they’d generally been written by middle class authors slumming it for the sake of material. When Alan Sillitoe burst onto the literary scene in…
THE ARMITAGE STOMP (Revisited)
This post brings together some thoughts I posted online today in response to the attention being given a negative review posted on the Stride website by poet and critic Martin Stannard of…
TESTIMONIES FROM GAZA: Two new books on Gaza reviewed by Neil Fulwood
We Are Not Numbers: The Voices of Gaza’s Youth, edited by Ahmed Alnaouq and Pam Bailey (Hutchinson Heinemann) Who Will Tell My Story? – A Gaza Diary by Anonymous (Guardian Faber) The genesis…
Brett Evans: Three Poems
Argument for Devolved Media in Cymru And we finish our tour of Conwy Castlein the Cunt’s Tower; here’s Rod Liddletied to a chair. That bloodied rag now gagsa toothless mouth and broken…
Edward Mackinnon: Five Poems
ON BEING A FATHER IN GAZA The hospital doctor told memy son had a slight chance of survival.When I went back I couldn’t findmy son,the doctoror the hospital. THE WRITING ON THE…
THE HOUSES OF VLADIMIR: Poem by Anthony Owen
THE HOUSES OF VLADIMIR Nothing weighs more thana child’s body limp as flagsof blue sky and wheat. Nothing deafens morethan mothers ululatinggrief that scatters birds. This permanent rainof worldly things turned hellish…
John Lucas (1937-2025): A Tribute
Photograph of John Lucas copyright Graham Lester George When Roy Marshall asked me, back in 2016, when I was going to stop mucking about and put a collection together, my reply was…
TRUMP’S BIRTHDAY SURPRISE: Two poems by Shaun Belcher
Trump’s Birthday Party Surprise In Minnesota a right-wing evangelistDressed as a Marlboro County Cowboythen as a policeman knocked the door And fired multiple shots through it at two lawmakersand a Spinal bifida…
POEMS VS THE CURSE OF TRUMPERY: Four poems by Graham Lock
Liar! Liar!with sincere apologies to William Blake Liar! Liar! orange bright,beacon for the ultra right.What immodest boast or liecould TRUMP your own mendacity? On what distant golf-course greendid you learn to strut…
Kathleen Bell – Three Poems
LEAVINGS I Left behind Some left. Just being scaredwasn’t enough. Cash helpedand social statusmight give a useful contact.Luck mattered most. As for the left behind,we struggled. The unlucky always do.Some were unwise….
Fawzia Muradali Kane – Guaracara (Carcanet): Book Review by Wayne Burrows
The writer and architect Fawzia Muradali Kane’s third book, and her second full length collection, Guaracara, emerges almost fifteen years after her debut, Tantie Diablesse (Waterloo Press, 2011), and more than a…
CARRY ON SARGENT
Edwardian Dandy, savvy Savoyard and Imperial Father of the Proms, Sir Malcolm Sargent (1895 -1967) has, like many great musicians of the past, been all too easily typecast. Even before his death,…
Cathy Grindrod: Three Poems
The best days of your life The girl in the nettles, rolled overand over, for talking posh the sensational bruise a hockey stickmakes on a mottled leg the shape of my undiagnosed…
How to be a poet: META AI advice
Shaun Belcher asks Zuckerberg’s robots how to be a poet….the answers are surprising Here the transcript of whole interaction. Ever felt down in the dumps? That the world not recognising your talents..that…
Graham Lock: Three Poems on Gaza
Shylock and Portia Address Benjamin Netanyahu Shylock: Hath not a Gazan eyes? Hath not a Gazan hands, organs, senses, passions? Are they not subject to typhoid, hunger and despair? If you bomb…
Ruth Hobson: Three Poems
The King is Dead In 1536, a woman imagining the death of a kingwas to be drawn on a hurdle to the pyreand burned alive. Well, I don’t want him to die,…
Benjamin Zephaniah, Sitting Bull and a Sleepy Nation – Andy Croft
Effective oppositional spaces are rapidly disappearing. Democratic process is blocked by inequality, authoritarianism, deceit and a narrow ideological consensus. Constitutional and legal constraints on power, within and between nation states have no…
Mu Cao: Poems translated by Hongwei Bao
Translator’s note:All the poems are translated from Chinese into English with Mu Cao’s permission. I have chosen to use small case to translate all of Mu Cao’s poems because Chinese characters do…
Mu Cao: Dark Chronicler of China’s Working-Class Queer Life – Hongwei Bao
For more than two decades, working-class queer Chinese Mu Cao 墓草 (b.1974, Henan, China) has been a unique voice in Chinese literature and global queer literature. Often referred to as a ‘folk…
Fiona Robertson – Three Poems
Bittersweet I bathe in the bittersweetnessof ill sonsand bereaved friendsand strangers connectingand and and old friends back on trackand death in lifeand birth after deathand the limitations of languageand the beauty of…
Gregory Woods – Three Poems
HOLDING STILL You imagine me standing at the windowwatching the fireworks above the harbourYou imagine me choking back the tears and the cocaineheartrate uncommonly highspirits expectedly lowYou imagine me burning your lettersand…
REVIEW: Release the Sausages! edited by Andy Croft (Culture Matters) – Neil Fulwood
There is a technique in poetry, borrowed from Apophatic Theology, called the via negativa, whereby attention is drawn to the subject by dint of its absence. This new anthology, subtitled Poems for…
Tuesday Shannon – Three Poems
On Belper Bridge At the plunge three blackened alder snagsreach for this final January morning. Unwavering against the crushing flow, waterfroths at each darkened trunk. A magpie circles, swoops,settles on a branch….
The Greenwash Recycle – Shaun Belcher
THE GREENWASH RECYCLE Starts in a marketing agency hand-out around the milleniumSocial demarcation and quantifying statistics showed newer markets More social class segmentation and new science of social media metricsIdentified new opportunities…
Martin Figura & Helen Ivory – HUM
Martin Figura and Helen Ivory .
Commissioned for a performance at The National Centre for Writing, Dragon Hall, Norwich as part of the European Poetry Festival
Martin Figura – Two Poems
Martin Figura – Foundling – A Poem
REVIEW: My Secret Life: Selected Poems by Krisztina Tóth, trans. George Szirtes (Bloodaxe) – Neil Fulwood
REVIEW: My Secret Life: Selected Poems by Krisztina Tóth, trans. George Szirtes (Bloodaxe)
A SUMMER CASE OF CULTURAL IRRELEVANCE : THE TLS – Nick Ingram
A SUMMER CASE OF CULTURAL IRRELEVANCE – The Tls – Nick Ingram
WICKER POETS? In Wicker land any fool can write.. Shaun Belcher
WICKERLAND? It’s like MOTHERLAND but without the humour.. more AMANDA writes poetry…..god help us all.