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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…
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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 & preen?Whence the bragging? Whence the bile?Whence that vain & faux hairstyle? And what migrant plea or groan,could hope to crack your heart…
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CHRISTOPH VON DOHNÁNYI (1929 – 2025): Obituary by Neil Fulwood
Christoph von Dohnányi died on 6 September 2025, two days shy of his 96th birthday. To say he’d led a full life would be an understatement. It’d be no exaggeration, in fact, to say that his life was the stuff of an epic novel or a sweeping Hollywood production with a hefty budget. All the…
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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. You call them martyrs.Most kept their heads down, had to endureblockade and damaged harvest.And those in charge –you know how rulers are. At…
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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 decade on from the appearance of her chapbook publication Houses Of The Dead (Thamesis, 2014). The long gaps were explained by Kane herself…
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COMICAL LITTLE GEEZERS: The ups and downs of PERFORMANCE
Here are some of the things Performance fetishises: Performance is about a lot of things, principally the merging and blurring of identities. With a specific focus on sexual identities (today’s word on Sesame Street is “troilism”). It’s about machismo and fragility; brutality and camp. It’s about the underground and the underworld. It’s about cufflinks and cross-dressing. It’s about class and…
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Please Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark: Time, imagination, grief and the quest for meaning in Don’t Look Now
The central nervous system conventionalises reality for us so that we can move through time and space … We’ve inherited large parts of our view of the world from our forebears hundreds of thousands of years ago … A sense of time gave Homo sapiens a way of storing, from minute to minute, information about…
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LANDSCAPE AND MINDSCAPE: The fragmented spaces of Donald Cammell’s ‘White of the Eye’
Following their collaboration on Performance – arguably the most influential counter-culture film to come out of the UK in the ‘70s – Nic Roeg went on to make 16 feature films, various shorts, and worked in television; Donald Cammell made just three more movies, a couple of shorts and some videos for U2. Of these three films, Demon…
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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, Sargent aka ‘Flash Harry’ was seen by many as a kind of musical Lord Fauntleroy: the John Mills of conductors replete with slicked-back…
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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 broken armgrinding through double maths acid eating through Mr Reed’s fingerhis dance round the lab dead frogs splayed on dissecting boardsfine silver tools…
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INSECTS, TINFOIL AND ASHLEY JUDD: The crazed brilliance of William Friedkin’s BUG
When you think of William Friedkin, you think of big set pieces crammed with detail. The exorcism and the myriad ways in which a demonic force kicks back in The Exorcist. The car/L-train chase in The French Connection. The car chase that pretty much traverses an entire city in To Live and Die in L.A. Dynamiting the fallen…
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DANGEROUS PAYLOAD: FRIEDKIN’S SORCERER AND THE LONG SHADOW OF THE WAGES OF FEAR – Neil Fulwood
Sorcerer was meant to be a modest, low-cost production; a filler between The Exorcist and a big-budget project called The Devil’s Triangle which was intended to capitalise on the former’s box office supremacy. The very idea of a remake of H.G. Clouzot’s nihilistic masterpiece being realised effectively on a moderate budget should have rung alarm bells from the start, and…
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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 fame will always elude you? Fear not Mark Z and crew have the perfect solutionJUST ASK META!You will be surprised what comes back…….