Contributors from Australia, Austria, Canada, England, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Palestine, Poland, Puerto Rico, Romania, Russia, Scotland, Serbia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Syria, Tasmania, Tunisia, Ukraine, USA, Wales, Zimbabwe


3,891,096
visitors since 2007
oppositional poetry, prose, polemic
...it is wrong... to imagine that the currently fashionable and approved constitutes the work of permanent importance
Alan Bold (1970)
Modern English polite society... seems to me as corrupt as consciousness of culture and absence of honesty can make it.
A canting, lie-loving, fact-hating, scribbling, chattering, wealth-hunting, pleasure-hunting, celebrity-hunting mob
George Bernard Shaw An Unsocial Socialist (1883)
The want of poetical power is the impelling force in the case of most versifiers. They would fain be poets, and imagine that the best way is to try to write poetry and to publish what they write. They will never see their mistake. Equus asinus still believes that the possession of an organ of noise is sufficient, with a little practice, to enable him to sing like a nightingale.
John Davidson (1857–1909)
It is necessary for the socialist poet to have more impressive technical equipment than his apolitical contemporaries because his task is that much more important.
Alan Bold (1970)
It's not so-called
"cultural Marxism" that's
the cause of an epidemic
of despair among young
people in the UK, it's 13 years
of immiseration and cruelty inflicted by the Tories: the hiking of university fees, unpaid internships, zero-
hours contracts, escalating rents, and the unaffordability of housing - the Tories have stripped a generation of hope!

Fascism is the last resort of failing capitalism, now the Tory Right is resorting to it...
National Conservatism
is a very real threat to our democracy...
Being a republican is not (yet) a crime - but lately it feels as if it is becoming one. The arrests of peaceful republican protestors have been deeply disturbing and against common notions of freedom of speech and the right to express one's opinion. The republican protestors have not been protesting against the nation's respectful mourning of the late Queen; rather, they have been protesting at the instant accession of a new king without any public consultation. Whilst we all know this is how the monarchy works, it is still perfectly reasonable for some republicans to voice their objections to a transfer of power which appears to be unaccountable. The UK needs to have a grown up discussion about these issues. Do we want to be a properly representative modern democracy, or do we want to remain only a nominal one? Do we want to become fully fledged Citizens, or are we content to remain Subjects who are citizens in name only? Should sovereignty remain with a monarch, or should it become something embodied in the wider body politic?
Heading 5
Heading 4

WEDNESDAY 22 NOVEMBER 2023:
THE DAY THE TORY GOVERNMENT CONDEMNED THE DISABLED TO FUTURE DESTITUTION
Chancellor Jeremy Hunt has announced in his autumn statement yet more punitive policies against the sick and disabled of the UK that will intensify government coercion and psycho-compulsion by forcing the incapacitated to find work or ultimately lose their already meagre benefit entitlements (the UK has one of the 'meanest' welfare systems in Europe), and even access to free prescriptions. Finding the rise in
sickness and disability post-Covid economically inconvenient (even though much of the increase is due to the devastating effects of long Covid, the trauma of the lockdown period, and subsequent mental health crisis, all exacerbated by the Tories' own gross negligence in handling the pandemic), the Tory Government is now redefining disability in order to spuriously find those too ill miraculously 'fit to work'. Its Department for Work & Pensions (DWP) is aided and abetted in this systematised malfeasance by private sector bounty-incentivised firms such as Independent Assessment Services (formerly Atos), Maximus and Capita through the thoroughly discredited work capability assessment regime. Since the first Tory welfare reforms of 2012 onwards, over 300,000 sick and disabled claimants have died prematurely or by suicide due to constant threats of sanctions, cuts and repeated assessments. That figure is now likely to double. This is SOCIAL MURDER according to the original definition. In a civilised society the disabled are protected. In British society, they are persecuted. This must be opposed by all decent and compassionate people. The crowning irony is that much sickness and mental health ill health in the UK are as a direct result of 13 years of vicious Tory social and (anti-)welfare policies. The Tories then blame their victims for their conditions, and punish them still further: it is a siege mentality against defenceless citizens, a vicious cycle of administrative violence against the most vulnerable in society, and it SIMPLY HAS TO STOP!
MILITANT
New Review Dominic Rivron on Bob Beagrie's The Last Almanac
New Review Alan Morrison on the Selected Poems of Clive Branson and the Collected Poems of Montagu Slater
New Review Alan Morrison on Alan Price's The Cinephile Poems
New Review Alan Morrison on Niall McDevitt's London Nation
New Review Alan Morrison on John McKeown's Ill Nature
New Review Kevin Saving on Matthew Hollis's The Waste Land – A Biography of a Poem
New Review Alan Morrison on Clare Saponia's Federal Gods
New Review Alan Morrison on Fran Lock's Dogtooth and Contains Mild Peril
New Review Alan Morrison on Geoffrey Heptonstall's Sappho's Moon
An Irreplaceable Presence In Poetry An Obituary for Niall McDevitt
A Poet of Compassion An Obituary for David Kessel
A Eulogy for David by his son Tom Kessel
New Reviews Felix Cassiel on Nancy Charley's How Death Came into the World
Felix Cassiel on RM Francis' Subsidence and Jo Colley's Sleeper
Philip Williams on Peter Branson's The Clear Daylight
Felix Cassiel on Owen Gallagher's Clydebuilt
Alan Morrison on Michael Crowley's The Battle of Heptonstall and Bob Beagrie's Civil Insolencies
Felix Cassiel on Karl Riordan's The Tattooist's Chair and Deborah Moffatt's Eating Thistles
Felix Cassiel on Andy Green's This Noise Is Free and Caroline Maldonado's Isabella
Alan Morrison on two new Shoestring collections by Andy Croft and Alexis Lykiard
Alan Morrison on Geoffrey Heptonstall's The Rites of Paradise
Reviews Dave Russell on James Joyce
Dave Russell on Duane Voorhees' Gift – God Runs Through All These Rooms
Felix Cassiel on Victoria Bean's Liberties
Felix Cassiel on Richard Skinner's Terrace
Felix Cassiel on Francis Combes' If The Symptoms Persist
Felix Cassiel on Goran Simić's New and Selected Sorrows
Alan Morrison on Stephen Sawyer's There Will Be No Miracles Here
Alan Morrison on Bernard Saint's Roma and Michael Crowley's First Fleet
Leon Brown on Mike Leigh's Peterloo (2018)
Jenny Farrell's Marxist Reading of Wuthering Heights
New Fred Russell on The Roots of Racism
New Marx & Morry David Betteridge on reading Karl Marx
Alan Morrison on Andy Croft's Letters To Randall Swingler
Alan Morrison on Ian Parks' Citizens
Dave Russell on Stevie James' A Lonely Man Circling the Earth
Kevin Saving on A Quiet Passion, Deaths of the Poets and The Bughouse: the poetry, politics and madness of Ezra Pound
Reviews Alan Morrison on Andy Willoughby's Between Stations
Alan Morrison on Larry Beckett's Paul Bunyan
Dave Russell on Wendy Young's The Dream of Somewhere Else
New Poems Tom Kelly, Farid Bitar, Sheila E. Murphy, Simon Haines, Naomi Foyle, Paul Jeffcutt, Helen Jones, Partha Sarkar,
Gordon Scapens, Christopher Barnes, Vanessa Sadri, Yasmin Khan, Jerome Berglund, Roger Ettenfield, Mircea Boboc,
Michael Wyndham, Olecksandr Korotko, Stephen Mead, Joel Schueler, Antony Owen, Tasos Leivaditis tr. N.N. Trakakis,
Sanjeev Sethi, John Seed, Elaine Cusack, Charles March III, Keith Moul, Roger Ettenfield, Douglas Penick,
Stephen Kingsnorth, Tanner, Rudy Baron, Steve Pottinger, Ilhem Issaoui, Alan Price, Fiona Sinclair, Ken Simpson,
Sam Silva, Jim Morris, Keith Armstrong, Eduard Schmidt-Zorner, Rachel Hegarty, Liam O'Neill, Alan O'Brien,
Fred Johnston, David Butler, Moya Roddy, Michael Lee Johnson