If you can get along to Bethnal Green in the next three weeks, I highly recommend a visit to this exhibition of photographs. They document a dramatic period in the history of the East London.
Merryn Williams shares a few thoughts about Alan Dunnett’s rather challenging poetry collection which seeks, among other things, to capture “the psychological fallout of anxiety in modern capitalist culture”
Carla Scarano visits two exhibitions in Florence: The return to Italy of Salvatore Ferragamo in 1927 and the Dawn of a Nation after WW II
John Lucas reviews a genuinely interesting collection of essays by Jim Burns – and adds some equally interesting observations of his own
The East End of London was a crucible for radical ideas and activism, including the women’s suffrage movement, fired in part by the deprivation and inequality experienced by so many of its inhabitants.
Rip Bulkeley describes the planning and production of a forthcoming anthology of poems responding to the fire in Grenfell Tower .
Richie McCaffery examines a new anthology of Palestinian poetry, edited by Naomi Foyle, and finds it eye-opening
Fiona Sinclair commends Michael Rosen’s use of poetry to make some telling political points
James Roderick Burns has no doubts about the importance of Mayakovsky’s epic poem about Lenin in a new Smokestack edition by Rosy Carrick
Merryn Williams is doubly impressed – both by Andy Croft’s finely crafted poetry and by its subject, the unfairly neglected writer and activist, Randall Swingler
A temporary installation in Bloomsbury Square is a powerful reminder of the work of exiled Russian poets in the last century
London Grip Poetry Review – Edward Mackinnon
Neil Fulwood considers Edward Mackinnon’s forceful poetic dissection of 75 years of war