Le Corbusier has mostly gone down in history as a visionary Swiss urban planner. For the thousands forcibly evicted from District Six in Cape Town, he has a more sinister resonance as the proponent of “the surgical method” – as mentioned in the notorious apartheid-era Group Areas Act – of sweeping away what he saw as chaos and disorder.
history
A New Life for the Riding-Crop-Handle Maker; Sarah Lawson reminds us of a popular account of an immigrant’s experience which has – perhaps undeservedly – fallen out of the public eye
Bernard Green offers another of his distinctive reminiscences about his early life in post-war Surrey. .
Bernard Green has already given London Grip readers his memoir of Alf’s Café: here now is his “prequel” about dramatic incidents in Farnham in the 1940s…
Brian Docherty comments on political poems from pre-WW2 Japan by Kosuke Shirasu which have recently been republished in a bi-lingual edition by Jun Shirasu and Bruce Barnes
A memoir by Bernard Green tells the story of a transport café over sixty years before and after World War two.
Nick Cooke is impressed by the authenticity of Stuart Laycock’s collection of poetry from the Bosnian War
Nick Cooke explores Vanessa Gebbie’s poetic tribute to battle victims of World War One
David Cooke applauds the efforts of Paul Vincent & John Irons in selecting and translating an anthology which spans 1000 years of Dutch poetry
What exactly is the essence of Belgium? Far harder to pin down than French chic or English sang-froid, the nation’s uneasy mix of Walloon and Flemish, surreal and down-to-earth, all miraculously held together, is perfectly encapsulated by the Atomium – a giant, futuristic structure on the northern edge of Brussels.
Paul McLoughlin reviews a collection set in the 1930s which recreates a lost age that was both golden and flawed.
James Roderick Burns notes that Michael Crowley has taken some risks in order to negotiate a way through conflicting themes and historical viewpoints in his new collection
By Michael Bartholomew-Biggs • books, history, poetry reviews, year 2017 • Tags: books, history, James Roderick Burns, poetry