CHRIS SEARLE welcomes a startling vision of contemporary Newport from a veteran photographer of the British working class
As Adrian Mitchell once remarked, "Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people."
It's still a great line and it appears as the epigraph to Tony Walsh's Sex & Love & Rock&Roll (Burning Eye, £10). Walsh has been performing for a decade now - he was recently poet in residence at the Glastonbury festival - but this is his first collection.
Bristol-based Burning Eye Books, whose mission is to promote "poetry for people who don't like poetry," are committed to proving that performance poetry can work on the page as well as the stage.
The Bard does Bearded Theory, and lodges a complaint about bandnames
ALAN MORRISON recommends a consummate, heart-warming collection about a working-class upbringing in the industrial north-east
ANDY CROFT welcomes the publication of an anthology of recent poems published by the Morning Star, and hopes it becomes an annual event
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


