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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 car park of a roadhouse then go back inside.Who work their way through brands of mouthwashlike fresh-breath sommeliers, coming downoff the Scotch. Who…
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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 Nottingham Central Library and was run with digital printing and desk-top publishing software, which was still new, and which was helped by my…
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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 ofcourse, there was just like a bad smell in the airand everything went sour; people’s mouths and eyeschanged their look overnight – and…
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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 to relatable world events –Someone in England died from the skinny jabAlan misgendered Beth again raise a low-level concernAnd don’t worry about Sudan…
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THE GOOD LIFE: SOCIALISM IN SURBITON – Robert Kenchington
This year marks the 50th anniversary since the original broadcast of one of the most beloved of British television series, The Good Life. Created and written by John Esmonde and Bob Larby, the series’ premise is well known: namely the highs and lows of a middle-aged suburban couple who decide to quit the rat race…
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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 one of those accused of trying “to seduce a member of Her Majesty’s Forces from their duty”. Though I doubt whether I’ve ever seduced…
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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 his wedding day,a girl’s name: he loved but never told,the guitar he never bought or learned to play.He rolls the strands in slivers…
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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 subsequent Republic, at 19 when I spent one summer voraciously reading various books on the subject. What particularly fascinated me was how a…
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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 Carson’s Autobiography of Red from 1998. Indeed, the verse novel currently seems to be the province of Young Adult writers, with the likes of Jacqueline…
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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 few years off being able to buy a drink legally. Self-styled “virgin groupie”. Accidental tourist, grand-touring Europe on a wing, a prayer, a…
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ELEGY IN A ZOMBIE-INFESTED CHURCHYARD: THE WEIRD AESTHETIC OF REQUIEM FOR A VILLAGE – Lucy Bellingham
What’s the weirdest zombie film you’ve ever seen? Zombeavers? Fido? Anna and the Apocalypse? I’ll see you and I’ll raise you: David Gladwell’s Requiem for a Village. Gladwell is mainly remembered as the editor of Lindsay Anderson’s If… and O Lucky Man!, and Requiem for a Village is, well, not remembered at all. Not that its struggle to find an audience is exactly perplexing….
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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 1958, the difference was palpable. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was the real thing. It was in-your-face, attitudinous, unapologetic and fired up with fighting…
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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 the newly published ‘Paper Aeroplane: Selected Poems 1989-2014. Review available here: Martin Stannard Review Me and Simon Armitage I had been writing quite…
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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 of the We Are Not Numbers project – commonly referred to by its founders and contributors as WANN – goes back to 2014….
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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 nose –we wear ours too, as protectionfrom our Covid spreading languageand beat his face with thick blue books,shouting each count of the Welsh…
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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 WALL The Book of Daniel tells the story of Belshazzar,acting ruler of Babylon, a debauchee who bingedand banqueted like there was no tomorrow…
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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 –a blank diary page. Poland breathes them in.Children wish on yellowed starsstitched into earths skin. In Mariupol,deer are struck by tanksaccepting the metal…
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Five Leaves Left: Robert Kenchington
“One day he’ll be a famous conductor!” said Molly Drake as her five year old son, Nick, waved in time with the music on his nursery wind-up gramophone. If only. As history transpired, Nick Drake (1948-1974) became one of the greatest and most influential singer/songwriters in the history of music – and one of the…
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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 that I genuinely had no idea who I could send it to. I was realistic that the likes of Faber, Carcanet, Shearsman, etc…
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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 daughter who was only savedby her mother taking the bullets aimed at her He then shot dead a woman and spouseWho had put…