CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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Us and them: the false narrative in the Rebecca Watts controversy
NEIL FULWOOD pitches into a heated argument about class and poetry
[Steve Johnson]
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
WHEN Rebecca Watts's essay The Cult of the Noble Amateur appeared in literary publication PN Review, reaction was immediate.
The poetry world was divided. Debate raged on social media. Battle lines were drawn. All well and good, since Watts’s article was doubtless intended to provoke a dialogue.
But the crux of her argument — that major publishing houses are shepherding out work that is not yet ready by poets whose apprenticeship has not yet been served — has been lost to an obfuscatory narrative of class that many commentators seem keen to perpetuate.
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