CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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Abstract poems that fail to get under your skin
None of the poets in this collection reveal any understanding whatsoever of the politics involved or the context, writes JOHN GREEN
‘NO TO WAR, snow grafitti on a housing estate in Petrozavodsk, March 2022
[Pic: Katja Zlatya/CC]
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
Disbelief: 100 Russian Anti-War Poems
Edited by Julia Nemirovskaya
Smokestack Books £9.19
THE Russians have an admirable track record of anti-war poetry, based on the devastation its people suffered during the last century from the many invasions. I was therefore intrigued to hear about this new book of 100 anti-war poems from Smokestack which also has an admirable track record of internationalism in its publications list.
I was, however, seriously disappointed with this one. More than half of the poets represented live outside Russia or Ukraine, several in the US or Israel and the poems, by and large, reflect that distance.
Whereas earlier Soviet poets, just like our own WWI poets, knew first-hand what war was like and could express it viscerally in compelling and powerful imagery, in this collection the experience feels shred-bare and second hand, written at a distance; the poems are abstract and fail to get under your skin.
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