CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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Original lines on the working-class experience
21st century poetry with Andy Croft
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
JAMIE BRITTON recommends this fine analysis of the architectural, ecological and infrastructural destruction of the Gaza Strip
ALISON CARR’S Corner Shop Cowgirl (Iron Press, £7) is one of the most original poetry books of the year, cleverly imagining her native Co Durham as a lawless Wild West landscape of tumbleweed towns, one-armed bandits, line-dancers, outlaws and the “coyote calls of men without work.”
Between the Indian takeaways and the empty charity shops lies the “Lost Chance Saloon,” where most afternoons you can find the old timers “galloping through bullet country/ Among the slow burning pints,/Ash trays, pork scratchings/And flipped beer mats”:
“A limp-along cowboy,/Once a miner,/He now counts out his future in coins from a jar,/As he takes his seat at the end of the bar./He calculates every penny, holds tight to every pound,/His meagre pension must go round and round.”
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ALEX HALL is fascinated by a lucid and historically convincing account of how rent has dominated capitalist economies from feudalism to modernity
From sexual innuendo about Blackpool Rock to Bob Dylan’s ‘God-almighty world,’ the corporation’s classist moral custodianship of pop music has created a roll call of censored artists anyone would feel honoured to join, writes NICK MATTHEWS
RON JACOBS welcomes a survey of US punk in the era of Reagan, and sees the necessity for some of the same today
By Alexis Lykiard