sheenaghpugh | Entries tagged with politics

We will never stop being a nuisance.

This is the story of how a young Afghan woman, in the time between when the Taliban were first driven out of government and when the West, unforgivably, allowed them back, managed to create an Afghan women’s football team, and then had to get them out of the country before the returning bigots could wreak revenge on them. Along the way she has to combat conservative (one might rather say mediaeval) attitudes that are much the same whoever is in power, a warlord who encourages the team but only for his own murky ends, and men who resort to violence with little or no provocation. “To be a young woman in Afghanistan is to grow up with violence. To learn not to fight back. To fight back is to risk being killed. If you are beaten it’s because you were at fault, you must have done something wrong.”

Popal, however, does fight back because, and she makes no bones about this, she is a difficult, ruthless, uncompromising person who must sometimes be hard to live with. No other sort of person could possibly achieve what she did. As she says, “I wanted to kick open as many doors as possible before I was kicked out of one.” Unlike many, she was blessed with an understanding, non-religious family who supported her, but this made life very hard for them with their more conventional neighbours. Her father and brothers do sometimes beg her to row back a bit, which she will not do; only her mother is unfailingly supportive.

Under the first Taliban regime, her family, like many, escapes to Peshawar, where she and girls like her enjoy far more freedom than they had at home. “In our new neighbourhood, I was able to join in street football games, huge games with uneven teams. I loved it. We ran after the ball in packs, laughing until we couldn’t breathe.” When the Taliban fall, there is a noticeable generation gap between parents who can’t wait to return and youngsters, of both genders, who do not want to give up their new freedom. “I felt hugely conflicted, caught between my own raging emotions and the new light I could see gleaming from my parents and grandparents My brothers and I raged at the unfairness of it. We recognised their delight, but we could not share it.”

The pessimism of the young proves well founded as schools for women are shut down, (during the interim they had been so popular with girls trying to catch up on their lost education that the school day had to run in shifts). Music, TV, dancing and most of what makes life fun are banned, “Taliban” and “fun” being more or less antonyms. People anxious not to be persecuted themselves boost their credentials by informing on their neighbours. In the midst of all this, and in the teeth of men who physically attack her and shout “whore” after her in the street, Popal creates a team that ends up playing international matches with some success.

Unsurprisingly, she and her mother eventually become refugees in Denmark. From here, she becomes central to the frantic efforts to evacuate women football players before the returning Taliban can get hold of them. FIFA has no interest in helping them but some individuals, like Leeds United chairman Andrea Radrizzani, do miracles of PR, and Kim Kardashian sponsors a charter plane from Pakistan when it looks as if the government there will hand the women back to Afghanistan. There will be some surprises here, eg for those who were told that the Afghan army effectively gave in to the returning Taliban, when the truth is that they were desperate to fight but were prevented by the government.

This is a tense narrative, with many dispiriting aspects, but what prevails is a sense of exhilaration in the defiance of these oppressed young women:

“One day, a girl named Damsa, a powerful and talented left back, turned up to one of the training sessions visibly upset. When pressed she told us that she had been beaten by her brother because she had wanted to rush off to football before she’d finished washing the dishes. She had twisted free of him and got to training, but she didn’t know what she would return to. The other girls nodded along, tutting in sympathy. ‘Fucker,’ said Samira sharply, and the girls looked at her. ‘Fucker’, said Damsa, and the women laughed.

We all took off our headscarves and felt the air moving through our hair.”

It is incidents like this that make one realise how necessary it is to be stroppy, to make a pest of oneself, in order to change anything. “We will never stop being a nuisance. We will never stop poking and prodding. We will never stop asking for the rights that should be ours.” At intervals, Popal articulates what football means and has meant in her situation: “To be part of a team is to be reminded that you matter. To be relied upon and to rely on others. To feel that you exist. When your team scores and you run to greet each other, shouting in joy, you are calling out to each other, ‘I am here! I am here!’”

book cover

In 1776, David Hume, near the end of his life, speculated on excuses he might give to Charon when invited to step into his ferryboat: “If I live a few years longer, I may have the satisfaction of seeing the downfall of some of the prevailing systems of superstition”. But Charon would then reply, “You loitering rogue, that will not happen these many hundred years. Do you fancy I will grant you a lease for so long a term? Get into the boat this instant.”

Hume belonged to a generation of thinkers who “tended to see themselves as postwar generations. Between the sixteenth and early eighteenth centuries Europe rarely saw a year of peace. The Enlightenment began when these religious wars ceased.” To his mind, fanaticism and bigotry had been replaced by tolerance and calm, with opposing parties able to argue rationally instead of attempting to outlaw or kill each other. What concerned him as he awaited the ferryman was the fear that old times might be coming around again, but in a different guise.

Hume had once thought that increasing commerce between nations would of itself make war less likely – trade flourishes best in peacetime, and states which may heartily dislike each other’s politics and religion will nevertheless maintain at least polite relations for the sake of their mutual profits. But in fact trade wars had replaced religious ones, and states were empire-building through war to protect and expand their trade, and to satisfy the appetite for luxury goods that this trade created in the populace. The mutual dependence of governments and merchant companies worried philosophers and political economists like Adam Smith; “Merchant companies made their own interests sovereign, he argued, to the detriment of indigenous peoples who became only a source of profit, and to domestic governments, who became their fools”.

Nor had fanaticism vanished; it had simply moved from the realm of religion to that of politics. Hume “believed that British politics had become increasingly polarized between camps that portrayed those with different views as beyond the pale, as supporters of despotism or anarchy”, and it is hard to disagree with him when one reads rhetoric like Burke’s on the “wicked principles and black hearts” of men like Richard Price and Lord Shelburne, who, however much they may have disagreed with him, were demonstrably neither unprincipled nor black-hearted. They would have classed themselves as moderates, as indeed Burke classed himself; it is remarkable how politicians and thinkers on all sides of the argument saw themselves as moderates and their opponents as fanatical zealots. Politicians, particularly the Whigs who had been in power for most of George II’s reign, also tended to confuse their own interest with that of the nation; when they lamented that the country was going to the dogs, what they generally meant was that they personally were out of office.

Almost none of them, indeed, had any faith in the ability of the general public to elect the right men, manage affairs, or cope with any kind of power. Shelburne, an amiable sort who genuinely desired the “Happiness of Mankind”, also confessed to being ‘sorry to say upon an experience of forty years, that the public is incapable of embracing two objects at a time, or of extending their views beyond the object immediately before them’. He, and others, felt that democracy led to the public being bamboozled by jingoistic demagogues (and if they were alive today, they might well feel vindicated in that view). Wollstonecraft, who had once thought people were naturally virtuous or could soon become so, wrote in 1796 that she had ‘almost learnt to hate mankind’. Obviously some of this was owing to disillusion following the chaos into which the French Revolution had descended; it does not seem to have occurred to many that the excesses of the previous monarchy had in large part caused this violent swing. Burke, fulminating about ““a discontented, distressed, enslaved, and famished people”, gives no hint that this had been exactly the case under the old regime as well. It might have been supposed that regimes elsewhere would learn not to imitate Bourbon intransigence, but in fact they became ever more illiberal out of fear for their own privilege and landed interests. Gibbon was convinced that any concession to political reform would be fatal – “if you do not resist the spirit of innovation in the first attempt, if you admit the smallest and most specious change in our parliamentary system, you are lost”. He “shuddered” at the plans of Charles Grey, who would go on to steer the 1832 Reform Bill to success.

This study, which would take an essay to review in detail, records and analyses the reactions of thinkers including Hume, Burke, Paine, Wollstonecraft, Catharine Macaulay, Gibbon, Shelburne and Brissot to the end of the Enlightenment years and the American and French revolutions. It also sees this period as analogous in some ways to our own, in that now too, political discourse and much else seems to be polarizing, fanaticism and intolerance to be on the rise and a spell of relative peace coming to an end. In many ways it is less a history book than a book about theories of history, which could easily have been unreadably dull; fortunately it is written with great clarity and allows the characters of its fiercely intellectual protagonists to come across, often via their own words. Even Wikipedia, that fount of knowledge-substitute, gives no hint that the phrase “the silent majority” did not originate with Nixon or Coolidge, nor yet as a humorous Victorian description of the dead, but may be found in Mary Wollstonecraft’s description of the poor of Britain as “a silent majority of misery”.

Lance-Corporals of Love

Who knew? That the Stasi, East Germany’s secret police, when not prying into people’s private affairs, destabilising marriages and generally messing up lives, met to study the sonnet and produce anthologies of poetry? But then, as Oltermann points out “the history of the GDR is a book usually read back to front”. We all know, indeed some of us saw, the latter days of the paranoid gerontocracy, trying to make fear do the work of the enthusiasm they could no longer engender. But it is easy to forget that some of those who first set it up were imbued with genuine idealism and a desire not only to reclaim Germany’s impressive cultural heritage but to make it more available to the masses than it had ever been.

Johannes Becher, returning from Russian exile to postwar devastation, gave up his own writing to become a political fixer and give art - “the very definition of everything good and beautiful, of a more meaningful, humane way of living” - an honoured place in the new republic. Though he died in 1958, his dream of bringing artists together with workers survived him. “Theatres and opera houses handed out a proportion of their tickets to factories and educational institutions. A 1973 decree prescribed that larger factories must have an on-site library.” And the “Bitterfeld Path” programme sent writers out to run workshops among workers. “Within a few years every branch of industry had its own writers’ circle, by the end of the GDR in 1989 there were still 300 of them.” Christa Wolf, Brigitte Reimann and Erik Neutsch all wrote famous novels while on such placements.

However things finally turned out, these initiatives were clearly laudable. So what went wrong? Becher’s own view of the sonnet may give a clue. He saw it as the artistic expression of dialectical materialism, with the octave as the thesis, the first four lines of the sestet as the antithesis and the final couplet as the synthesis. But things just aren’t as tidy as that, nor do artists of any calibre generally feel at ease as part of a political establishment and singing its tune. It didn’t help that the government censors were hugely distrustful of the poets, feeling that the artful fellows were taking advantage of their ignorance of poetry to sneak sedition past them, as indeed they were – Uwe Kolbe’s subversive poem “Core of my Novel” got past in 1981 because the censors didn’t know enough to look for acrostics.

Their solution, typically, was not to give up trying to censor writing, but to employ spies better versed in these techniques, and the leader of the Stasi writing group, the really rather obnoxious Uwe Berger, was regularly writing intelligence reports on his students. Also, of course, their work was being directed into what he saw as useful channels. In the group’s early days, the younger students especially were keen to write love poetry and at first this was tolerated, until it became clear that this tended to political incorrectness:

“One young member of the secret police fantasised in free verse about being kissed by a young maiden unaware of his lowly rank, thus elevating him to a ‘lance-corporal of love’. ‘Patiently I wait’, the lusty teenager wrote, ‘for my next promotion/at least/to general’. Another young soldier imagined in a sestina writing the words ‘I love you’ into the dark night sky with his searchlight.” The energy, humour and inventiveness of these poems was promising. Alas, when the young poets began expressing the wish to have the beloved all to themselves, “never to be nationalised”, they were hastily guided into duller channels.

When they did manage to express genuine talent without interference, it was sometimes because they themselves were also working undercover for the state. This was the case with the group’s most talented poet, Alexander Ruika, though it also sounds as if he was not only coerced into it but produced reports his masters must have found singularly unhelpful. The three-way conversation between Ruika, Oltermann and the novelist Gert Neumann, on whom Ruika had gathered intelligence, is fascinating, as is the way Neumann baffled the government, not only because they couldn’t for the life of them understand his prose but because, though a constant thorn in the establishment’s side, he showed no desire to leave for the west and indeed worried that if he did a western tour, as some writers did, he might not be allowed back in. It never seems to have dawned on them that criticism did not necessarily mean rejection.

I’d have loved to see some of the poems from which Oltermann quotes reproduced in the original German in an appendix, which could have been a real asset. But this is otherwise a most informative, balanced and thought-provoking book.

Review of Almarks: Radical Poetry from Shetland, ed. Jim Mainland & Mark Ryan Smith, pub. Culture Matters 2020

Off Skyros at midnight
The heads of the little drowned children
Gently knock against the hulls of the yachts. (Stuart Hannay)

This is an anthology of radical poems from living poets in Shetland, which at once raises the question of “what’s radical?” Jim Mainland’s introductory essay indicates that he takes it to refer both to subject matter and style. This essay is a joy in itself; I shall treasure his demolition of the buzzword “virtue-signalling” - “surely the most linguistically flat-footed of insults – imagine Shakespeare coming up with something as weak as ‘take that, you virtue-signaller!’”.

It’s arguable that writing in dialect rather than “standard” English is itself radical, and not including a glossary of dialect forms even more so. There are several poems in Shetlandic, and I found them accessible enough, but then I’ve been around the dialect for a while now. If you can follow Ola Swanson’s high-energy polemic on the locally controversial topic of windfarms, “Da Carbon Payback Kid’s Ill-wind Phantasmagoria”, you’ll be fine:

We tak in Windhoose, Flugga, an spend da night under dis baby,
da crazed Shelthead telt me, an du widna want ta dae it too often.
On migrations it’s a big bird windfeast
o waarblers an laverick tongues in aspic
an see whin a raingoose hits it’s lik instant pâté, min.

A wind-sooked inta-gridpooer guy gae me da wikiphysics
but I already hed a lingerin o it fae da Bridders Grimm.
Da whole rig set up a vibe an drave you gibberin ta money.

One thing that comes over as “radical” from this lively piece is how dialect can be employed on the most contemporary of themes, rather than being the preserve of folk song and nature poems. Laureen Johnson, in “March-past at Arromanches”, written after the 50^th anniversary of D-Day (how time does fly), uses the dialect’s homeliness to cut through the pomp and ceremony:

But oh, in every waddered face
you see da eyes o boys.

And Beth Fullerton, harking back to a time when standard English was enforced in schools, feels an instant rapport with the poem “I Lost My Talk” by First Nations poet Rita Joe in Ottawa’s Museum of Nations. It’s possible that those whose native dialect is standard English will not appreciate fully the radicalism of “Tongue”, but Welsh, Scottish and Irish readers should have no bother:

You tried to tak my midder tongue
bit sho wis always dere
waitin
beyond da riv
o your horizon

Among the non-dialect poems, Raman Mundair’s “Let’s talk about a job” is memorable both for its subject matter (a job advert for an under-qualified, compliant doctor to work at an immigration detention facility in Louisiana) and its form, which is an unclassifiable but powerful melange of poetry, prose and drama. It’s also hard to quote from, because it uses a lot of repetition to build up a huge head of quiet but boiling anger. Its understated, matter-of-fact language is the antithesis of the ranting sometimes associated with “radical” poetry and far more effective. I would love to see it performed.

There’s only one poem by co-editor Jim Mainland, which is modest of him but a pity, I think, because he is in many ways one of the most radical writers in Shetland and any anthology of contemporary radical Shetland poems that doesn’t include his poem “Prestidigitator” has a serious lack. There are also several images (I think mainly abstract paintings though some might be photos) by Michael Peterson, including the cover image reproduced here.

Declaration of interest: there are also three of mine here, but as usual I decided it was reasonable to review the rest of the anthology.

This being an anthology, the quality, as always, is variable. There are some pieces I like less than those above, and all readers will find that so – nor will the poems they like necessarily be the ones I like. But they should all find a lively, thought-provoking body of work from a great variety of artists. One radical aspect of this anthology is its inclusiveness: we have as many female writers as male, including a trans female writer, and though BAME voices are thin on the ground in Shetland, the most striking piece in the anthology is from an Indian-born Shetlander, Raman Mundair. An almark, by the way, is a sheep that habitually breaks bounds. It’s a good word.

crossing the liminal
places of the homeless

Those who accuse poetry of failing to engage with current concerns do not really understand the process whereby events and concerns are transmuted into poetry. Disparate things come together and meld into something new, stirred round in what mediaeval Welsh bards called Ceridwen’s cauldron. This osmosis takes time, but the material of what might be called the mass migration question, the steady westward stream of refugees and poor folk trying to better themselves, is just about ready now and is surfacing in many a collection.

Crucefix’s long poem came about in just this way: two quite separate experiences playing off each other. In 2016, the poet listens to a reading of Seamus Heaney’s translation of Book 6 of The Aeneid, but finds the pictures in his head are not of the banks of Acheron but the shores of the Mediterranean, with the bodies washed up thereon, in particular that of three-year-old Alan Kurdi (the name at the time was widely reported as Ayan or Aylan but is indeed Alan).

So a world-famous photograph and a reading, a mythical river and a real sea, a classical poet and his twentieth-century translator, a morally quite dubious hero and the most innocent of small boys all blend in the cauldron. The result is a rethinking of the moment in the Aeneid where our hero, accompanied by his priestess guide, arrives at the bank where dead souls congregate in hopes of being ferried over but are only allowed into Charon’s boat if they have had their funeral rites. The others, the “resourceless” as Virgil calls them, are stranded between worlds and Aeneas, not always the most compassionate man, pities their plight.

In this version the priestess, appropriately for a book of both poems and photographs, becomes a “lensman”, and Aeneas is Andras, a credible Middle European-ish name - and here I must dissent from Choman Hardi’s introduction, which identifies him with a demon of that name. There does indeed seem to be an Andras in the demonology, who commands thirty legions of demons, but this is surely pure coincidence, of which the poet may well not even have been aware. Andras here is just a name that happens to sound vaguely like Aeneas, and this Andras’s outburst at the end of the poem is purely human:

Suppose I know –
even from what lives
these wretches come –
from what wretched plight

out of what violence
to want this – pay for this –
say by what rule
by what moral right

does any man here let
some pass and some pushed
back into the night
no less fraught than

the cold and lethal waters
these others scrum
to risk their lives upon…

It is essentially the same question Aeneas asks – “how is it decided who are to retreat from the bank and who are to be conveyed?” But the tone of perplexed curiosity in his voice has here been replaced by frustration and anger. And the identity of the “sullen boatman” is more fluid. When he
elects one but not another
leaves the remainder
he shoves them aside
rescues as he condemns
then clearly on one level this modern Charon is a people-smuggler, risking these unfortunates’ lives for the money they pay him. But the phrase “any man here” invites us to consider others who make choices – immigration officials, politicians, those who elect them – and the degree of their/our responsibility.

The photographs, so appropriate in a poem partly inspired by a famous photograph, were taken by Amel Alzakout in unusual circumstances. She herself, in 2015, travelled from Izmir in Turkey to Lesbos in a smuggler’s small boat. She was determined to film the journey but had to do so secretly, with a camera concealed in her sleeve, as smugglers are unsurprisingly shy of being filmed. Halfway across, the boat collapsed but she filmed on until rescue came.

The result is photographs that capture the surreptitiousness and haste of the enterprise, fleeting moments filmed from odd angles, over people’s shoulders, so that one feels part of the scene in which she found herself. Forty-two people on that boat died in the water; had she been among them, we should have lost not only a talented artist but a most unusual and striking record, which echoes and complements the moving, restrained cadences of the poem.

It’s an odd title for a press, this Hercules Editions. Hercules was a hulking dimwit with no style or delicacy: the books I have seen from this press are tiny, beautifully crafted jewels. At the end of this one, Andras is sufficiently moved by what he sees to stop his cameraman filming. His reaction is understandable but misguided;, for just as Amel Alzakout’s shots give us a unique insight into her journey, so the words in which Crucefix commemorates the “great cargo of limbs” crossing the ocean humanises them and brings them closer to us.

I can live with staying at home, especially since everything is shut and there's nothing worth going out for (I am actually more concerned that when this is over, so much of the leisure sector may have gone to the wall that there will still be nothing worth going out for). I think the "one walk a day" instruction is OTT, and is certainly being over-zealously interpreted by some police and councils - that's the natural tendency of jacks-in-office, which is why it is important never to accept what they do without question. But again, I am lucky enough to have a garden I can work in, so it doesn't bother me too much.

What does increasingly bother me quite a lot is what I can only call the masochistic, puppy-like enthusiasm with which some folk are greeting the temporary, probably necessary but surely to be regretted, sacrifice of their liberties. I have seen them saying online that people should "do as they are told", "not moan about it" (pardon me, it is the inalienable right of every citizen in a free country to moan, especially about the authorities and i shall go right on doing so) and "trust the government" - I would have laughed out loud at that one, if it weren't so potentially serious.

These folk tend to reference the "spirit of WW2", which only goes to show that they have talked to few survivors and read no Mass Observation diaries of the period, in which, believe me, there was much grumbling and little automatic trust. But I'd like to go back a little further in history, to the start of the 19th century when repressive measures, born in Establishment fears engendered by the French Revolution and Napoleon, in turn bred dissatisfaction and frustration that culminated in the Peterloo massacre. The slightest sign of disaffection was enough to panic the authorities into arbitrary legislation; at one stage, in response to what was probably a pebble thrown at the window of the Prince Regent's carriage, Habeas Corpus was suspended (for four months, "initially"). "Seditious meetings" were also banned and the government also tried to apprehend all printers and writers "responsible for seditious and blasphemous material" - they mostly failed at this, because juries rightly baulked at it and thanks to Charles James Fox's Libel Act of 1792, they and not the judge had the power to decide what was libellous. Not the first nor the last time the sublime Mr Fox would make a nuisance of himself in the eyes of over-authoritarian regimes.

Of course we are not at the stage where the soldiery are riding down peaceful protestors, but then the Regency did not get to Peterloo all of a sudden; it got there via a slow accretion of measures whereby the government granted itself too much power and characterised even mild expressions of dissent as "sedition" or even "treason". Nor did they learn from Peterloo; instead they passed the "Six Acts" of 1819, which outdid all repressive measures so far, forbidding meetings of more than 50 people and providing for 14 years' transportation for those guilty of "blasphemous and seditious libels" - ie, as J B Priestley remarks in "The Prince of Pleasure and his Regency" (Heinemann 1969), anything a Tory magistrate disliked.

This is one reason why I think it was unwise for Parliament to allow the strengthened government powers in the Coronavirus Act to run for as long as 2 years without further parliamentary scrutiny. And it would be even more unwise for the general public to stop scrutinising what government does, questioning it if it seems excessive, and generally regretting, even if accepting, the necessity for even a temporary infringement of liberty.

This is a slightly odd book; I think because of the author's background. He has academic qualifications and is indeed currently a professor of African studies, but he seems to have spent most of his working life as a journalist and it shows. The book concerns contemporary migration from Africa to Europe. He is good on statistics: I am glad I read it if only to discover what I didn't know, namely how slanted Africa's current population is toward youth, in contrast to the ageing population in most European countries. Given that African politics are in most places even more gerontocratic than ours, this makes for a large population of young people with poor employment prospects and little say in their own future – in some countries, where 60% of the population is under 18, it is literally impossible for a government to represent a majority of the people. And where you have a large population of disaffected youth, especially young men, you will have trouble.

The statistical analyses are informative (indeed sometimes a bit daunting to read) and he is good at identifying problems and causes, eg when he points out that it is seldom the poorest who emigrate, they having enough to do to survive, but rather those a few rungs up the ladder, and therefore increased prosperity in a country will not at first decrease emigration, as might be thought, but actually encourage it. But he seems to me to be way too keen, for an academic, on seeking parallels and examples from the world of fiction – folk tales, novels etc. I'm not saying these have no place at all in a factual book but I think he relies on them more than he ought in a book of essentially political analysis – the thing about fiction, after all, is that it didn't actually happen.

I'm also mildly baffled by a couple of assertions that, unless I'm missing something, just look wrong to me. One is his assertion that "immigration to the US from Africa became statistically significant only towards the end of the twentieth century" – pardon? How about the enforced immigration of all those kidnapped, uncounted slaves? Then there is the point when he talks of immigrant diasporas "Why should Malian immigrants in France, even those who have become naturalized French citizens, always remain part of a diaspora – be it Malian, African or simply "black" – when, say, Italian or Portuguese immigrants do not? Only African migrants are locked up in their past". In the first place, I doubt Italians and Portuguese are quite as free of their heritage as he thinks; secondly I would have thought Asian migrants were equally inclined to cling to their diaspora, for exactly the same reason as the Africans: both are an easily identifiable minority and often treated as such by people in their host country outside the diaspora.

Another occasion when he seems to me to ignore a fairly obvious answer is when, discussing the problem of ageing European societies, he asks "How then does one justify the a priori assumption that it would be better to integrate more immigrants into European societies than to offer Europeans incentives to have more children?" He does not try to answer this question; he presumably means it rhetorically, but it surely isn't. In the first place, in an overcrowded world it does make more sense to redistribute people than to create more of them. In the second, the assumption of most governments, often backed up by failed attempts, is not so much that it would be "better", rather that the alternative would be impossible. For most educated, liberated European women there is no financial incentive that would persuade them to have litters of half a dozen rather than stopping at two and spending the time saved on fulfilling their intellectual potential and generally having fun. it isn't primarily a matter of money but of doing something more exciting and satisfying than changing an endless series of nappies. And this is true the world over - the more educated women are, the fewer children they will have.

I don't think, in his final chapter "By Way of Conclusion" – the tentative title is accurate; he is way better at diagnosis than prescription – he does anywhere mention supporting women's education in Africa as part of a solution. But I can't be sure he mentions it nowhere, for the same reason I found it very hard to review the book – it has no index! Notes, yes, bibliography, yes, but if you want to remind yourself what he said about the janjawid, or Rwanda, you are out of luck. This is a huge omission in a factual book and makes it far less useful than it might be.

This announces itself as being about the "lives and afterlives" of Edward Whalley and William Goffe, two signatories to Charles I's death warrant who, on the eve of the Restoration, escaped to America. Lives, in the sense of what became of them in their new land; afterlives in the sense of their posthumous reputation there and its effect on later events.

This is the sort of odd corner of history that always attracts me, but I felt the "afterlives" bit was considerably the more interesting, and where the book really came alive. You would think that two men trying desperately to stay one step ahead of the officials sent out to arrest them would make a gripping narrative. If it doesn't, I think that is because Whalley and Goffe never really come alive as people. From the chapters dealing with the war and the Commonwealth, we learn that they were both good soldiers and very religious, which one might have guessed, and later we learn that Goffe was prone to depression and always felt a stranger in America. But that's about it. These men had wives and families in England, and were in correspondence with them, but we learn nothing of their personal relationships, and much as I sympathised with their cause, it was hard to get really interested in the fate of two men practically without personalities. In fact, the interest lies more in how their survival becomes tangled up with the political differences between Charles II and his already-murmuring American colony.

This may not be altogether the author's fault, because to judge by the fragment of Goffe's diary that remains to us, and is included as an appendix, he at least was an obsessively god-bothering bore of the first order. It is after he and Whalley die that they become part of America's mythology, and a good deal more interesting in legend and fiction than they ever were in life. The story of the "Angel of Hadley", which just might, fascinatingly, be true, has Goffe surfacing from hiding to lead the inhabitants of a town in fighting off an attack by indigenous tribes (who, you may not be surprised to hear, were entirely in the right of the quarrel). Hawthorne may have had this tale in mind in his short story "The Gray Champion", where an ancient Puritan returns from the dead at critical moments in his country's history, and the Angel story, true or not, is clearly related to legends in which other countries' champions - Arthur, Joan, Theseus, Holger Danske - appear to soldiers in battle centuries later. Other stories cluster around these two in folk memory - everyone seems to have wanted to claim a family connection to them, especially at times of conflict with England.

Their myth was helped to prosper by an astonishingly silly act on the part of the English government, which I hadn't previously known about. In 1662, just after the restoration, a statute was passed decreeing that the anniversary of Charles I's death, January 30th, should be observed in all churches of England, Ireland, Wales and the dominions as "an anniversary of fasting and humiliation" on which sermons should be preached lamenting disobedience to monarchs. Given that many, certainly in New England, regarded the day in question as anything but lamentable, this was a provocative folly which served only to keep grudges and resentment alive. "30th of January sermons", both in England and America, quite frequently became subversive, drawing attention to the faults of kings rather than their supposed divinity.

The way the two men become part of a country's myth and fiction is intrinsically interesting, and well documented here, as is the way their star rises and falls in popular estimation according to what is happening in politics at the time - heroes during the War of Independence, less so after the murders of Lincoln and Kennedy, both of which, at the time, were described as "regicides". I think the writing style could be livelier, and less inclined to repeat points already made. The contemporary pictures and engravings reproduced in the book are welcome, if a bit blurry.

This is an anthology of poems chosen from entries to a competition for poems on "themes relevant to working class life, politics, communities and culture". It was judged by Andy Croft of the publisher Smokestack and Mary Sayer of the Unite union.

Themed anthologies are odd beasts. Their big advantage is that they can appeal to readers who might not normally think poetry had much to say to them, or know where to begin with it – indeed they are, unless totally inept, pretty much sure to appeal to readers who share the anthology's particular interest. This reaching out to an unaccustomed audience is a worthwhile thing to attempt, though whether it succeeds would depend, I suppose, as much on the publisher's promotion skills as on the product. The themed anthology has drawbacks too, and most of them depend on the kind of theme chosen. If the theme is narrow in scope, the poems can be too repetitive and unvarying. This is not a problem here, for the theme is a pretty wide one. If the theme is in any way political, religious or ecological, the tone can soon start to sound preachy, and this is a problem in some poems here.

The one problem I think nearly all themed anthologies have is that, because the criteria for inclusion embrace theme as well as intrinsic merit, the content tends to be of more uneven quality than would be the case in an anthology chosen on poetic skill alone. Again this depends on how wide the potential pool was: there has been enough good poetry written on the theme of, say, the Great War to fill several anthologies. Here, the pool was the 800 competition entries. Going by the late Leslie Norris's estimate that, in competitions he'd judged, about 10% of the entries were in serious contention, this should have yielded about 80 poems of interest. In fact this pamphlet contains 23, and not all of them would make my cut, but then judging does contain some very personal elements.

The best, for my money, are those that approach their subject subtly, from an angle. This might be a metaphor, like football in Helen Burke's "The Match", which depicts its subjects

Stood outside the ground
Most of us.
Trying to get a ticket for our own lives.

Or it might be via a focus on one individual, as in Jim Mainland's "The Carpenter", celebrating the work of Francesco Tuccio of Lampedusa, who makes crosses out of driftwood and wreckage to commemorate refugees who died en route and celebrate those who survive. This poem's vocabulary shimmers with delicate allusion: Tuccio genuinely is a carpenter and the implications of a carpenter who makes crosses cannot be missed, but the reader is not bludgeoned with them. We are trusted to pick up throwaway references to

an ecumenical gathering
of hooks, screws, pins, tacks, staples, rivets, nails

and

gaudy, misshapen, blistered, sea-sucked
wreckage that is already reliquary

until the powerful ending, in which the cross itself turns into an image:

a tree out-branched, upright on the level plain,
a raised hand to haul you from hostile waters.

Steve Pottinger's poem "Glass collector" is another that derives its strength from its focus on an individual, who defies people's preconceptions about him, and from a play on the word "space". Again this succeeds because it is concerned not only to get its theme across but to use words well and memorably – the best way, by far, to get any theme across, if only polemicists would realise it. Could there be a more pointed or economical way to achieve what Owen Gallagher's Glaswegian narrator does in his coinage of "right hoorable" for "right honourable"?

There were several other poems that impressed me in places, though some were, I thought, itching for an editor. A few fell into the category of "carefully observed memories of childhood", a genre I generally find workmanlike rather than exciting, though this may be a personal taste. And a few were just too angry for their own good and ended up sputtering rather than speaking. The introduction mentioned with approval the "passionate" nature of the poems: passion is fine when controlled by intellect and distance, but if passion is allowed to take over a poem, verbal skill tends to take its leave.

I don't think you would need to identify as working-class to find things to like in this anthology, though you'd almost certainly need to be on the left of politics. The feeling of being preached at is there in fewer poems than I had feared it might be, and the best of the poems, about a third of them, are surely worth the modest £5 price-tag. It can be bought here

Jim Mainland's pamphlet titles are always an interesting indicator of what he is up to. A Package of Measures alluded both to government measures and the various verse forms he was using, while League of Notions, (reviewed here) again associated his political themes with the exuberance and fancy of his language and imagery.

"Fuglicaavie" is an Old Norse portmanteau word meaning, more or less, a blizzard of birds, originally coined by Shetland fishermen to describe the cloud of birds that follows a fishing boat coming in with its catch. The poem with this title is a shape-poem representing the said boat, and the picture – both the boat and the cloud of following birds – is made up of words from the Shetlandic dialect of Norn, the language spoken in the islands until a few centuries ago but now lost as a language, though many words survive in dialect. Anyone who doesn't get the point of shape-poems should have a look at this one and see how moving is the image of the cloud of lost words following the boat home; if there is a way this could have been as powerfully expressed without using a pictorial image, it isn't obvious to me.

But as one of the quotes used as an epigraph points out, the word caavie can apply to anything, which is why we also have the grim poem "Styrocaavie", about the pernicious microbeads of polystyrene, deceptively resembling snow, with which we are busy polluting "our" environment:

falling as friendly precipitation

in the beauty of clog and glom and chronic
fallout beside take-away residual hill and shore
headaches falling into the interstices and sleeving
for the central nervous symptoms whose falling

systems take hundreds of years to decompose whose
few known methods of breaking down cannot
be simulated

As can be seen, the language here becomes, in a different way from the words in "Fuglicaavie", itself a caavie, a blizzard of words not necessarily falling in what we may think of as the "right" order. And the randomness, the breakdown of ordered syntax, immeasurably heightens the anguish of the tone. Mainland is a poet living in a remote rural place; it would be a huge mistake to suppose him, on that account, apolitical or unaware of contemporary concerns, particularly environmental ones. Bidisha, chairing this year's Forward Prize panel, said snidely and superficially "A poet is not an old white heterosexual male philanderer talking about what he saw on his walk". Leaving out the "philanderer", this would actually be a fair description of Mr Mainland and his methods, but you see, madam, it rather depends how sharply one observes on one's walk and how one's talent transmutes observation into language.

As readers of his earlier work will know, Mainland often collaborates with musicians and some of his poems do have musical accompaniments which I've heard performed. When I was wondering how on earth the poem "Fuglicaavie" could be performed for an audience, it did strike me as possible, given a projector and soundtrack, so that the words could move across the screen, while several disembodied voices spoke them in random combinations. It would be unconventional, but then it is rare to find a poet to whom both shape and music are so important.

There are more conventionally constructed poems too in this collection – even a long poem in terza rima (""The Water Diviner"). But the measured cadences of "The Carpenter", celebrating Francesco Tuccio, who made the Lampedusa Cross from shipwreck wood in memory of drowned refugees, hold the same anguish and power as the caavie poems:

After the sea of children's cries, and worse,
the flooded, capsizing, submerged silence,
a slow dystopian interrogation
of lost papers and sifted identities

The poet conjures up a possible motivation for so hazardous a journey:

a dream
you once had, where you walked among strangers,
were freely enfolded in their welcome;
a gesture whose simple shape your fingers
now trace and retrace clasp and unclasp:
a tree out-branched, upright on the level plain,
a raised hand to haul you from hostile waters.

This pamphlet is £6 inc, p & p and is probably the best £6 you've ever spent if you are interested in what innovative and aware poetry can do, whatever the age, ethnicity and inclination of whoever writes it. The author is doing the distribution: he can be contacted at Rockville, Nibon, Hamar, Shetland, ZE2 9RQ. Or if you're lucky enough to live near Lerwick, you can find it in the Shetland Times bookshop.

Poetry is often accused of not addressing contemporary issues, public issues. This is a lazy accusation, generally made by people like columnists seeking for an easy headline, who either don't read much poetry or who don't get the role of nuance in poetry, expecting it to spell out The Ishoos in capital letters for the benefit of the obtuse (a group for whom poetry simply cannot cater and should not try to).

When I recently reviewed Frank Dullaghan's latest collection, Lifting the Latch, one poem in particular stood out for me as addressing a current issue in a way that only a poet, as opposed to a journalist or polemicist, could really hope to do. Frank has kindly agreed to my blogging about it and quoting it in full in the process, so I am.

The first thing to note is the narrative voice. It would have been very easy to choose an "I" voice and enlist sympathy for an individual. But this poem is in the "we" voice, assuming the identity of the countless multitudes who flee, and have always fled, one place for another. And while it empathises with their plight:

We walk with our lives
on our backs, our children,
drunk from walking, by the hand,
our pasts blown up behind us

this sense of multitudes also, quite deliberately, carries a hint of alarm, not from any ill-will on the part of the speakers but because their arrival heralds massive change to a way of life:

We move through your culture,
your story telling, your politics.
[…]
We will move through your memories,

your imagination, your knowledge
of yourselves.

It is the fear of such change that leads so many to be hostile and unwelcoming in the face of this influx. The poem does not deny its reality. But the narrative voice, through its emotionless patience, its inexorable repetition of "we move" and "we walk", not only echoes the trudging feet; it points up the inevitability of what is happening and the utter uselessness of trying to turn the tide, rather than live with it. The mention of the earth's rotation reminds us of how long it has been the case, ever since we came out of Africa, that we have been moving south to north, east to west – another advantage poetry can have in addressing "current issues" is by going beyond the "current". And although the poem never explicitly says so (see above, because it's a poem, not a polemic), its end points to the fact that this movement is not just political. If climate change does what most scientists think it must (and given the kind of noddies on the "denial" side, one is driven to think it certainly will), then what now looks like a flood will seem a trickle and those who now have borders, villages, countryside they can call their own will have to realise their own place in the world is not as secure as they thought. A powerful poem.

There is Nowhere Left
by Frank Dullaghan

We move through your borders,
your villages, your countryside.
We walk with our lives
on our backs, our children,
drunk from walking, by the hand,
our pasts blown up behind us.

We move through your language,
your donated food, your fields
of tents. We walk without hope,
as if this is our new reason for being –
this great walk, this achievement
of pushing the miles behind us.

We move through your culture,
your story telling, your politics.
We walk against the turn
of the earth - East to West, our
great numbers slowing its rotation.
We will move through your memories,

your imagination, your knowledge
of yourselves. Our footsteps
will dog the rhythm of your days.
We will walk across your clean
bed linen, your tablecloths, your
conversations. There is no stopping

now that we have started. There is
no use erecting barriers, arguments,
prayers, for you too are moving,
you too are losing your place.

"When I went down to the Stationery Office to get it, there were queues of people buying it, and I was looking at it on the bus and the conductor said 'I suppose you haven't got a spare copy of that?'"

One does not generally expect a 172-page Government report, with the riveting title of Social Insurance and Allied Services, to sell 100,000 copies in a month. But this was the Beveridge Report, published in 1942, which became the basis of the postwar welfare state. This book is the story of how Britain arrived at that point, after around a century and a half of agonising about the causes of chronic poverty and how best to tackle it.

It is a story both of ideas and of the individuals who espoused them. On the ideas front, the challenge was to get beyond the conviction of many that poverty among the able-bodied must be the consequence of moral failings, like drink or idleness, and that any kind of state intervention would inevitably demoralise the recipients and render them even less willing to work. Even now, this has not wholly gone away, but in the nineteenth century it was unquestioned, until research by the likes of Charles Booth and Seebohm Rowntree showed otherwise in the 1890s. One of the most oddly moving things in the book is the conversion of Edwin Chadwick, he who in 1834 had been partly responsible for deliberately making workhouses as unattractive as possible, lest the idle be minded to give up their jobs and move in. This is all most school history teaches about him, which is unfortunate, for Chadwick was that rarity, a man capable of learning better and admitting he had been wrong. The more he found out about working-class poverty, the more he realised that it was intimately bound up with ill health, and that this in turn resulted from the insanitary conditions in which many were forced to live. Like all converts, he then went too far and decided ill health was at the root of everything, which wasn't true either, but at least it had dawned on him that poverty was not necessarily the fault of the poor.

Rowntree's research in York went further, by identifying a five-stage working-class life-cycle of poverty and relative comfort. Basically he concluded that there were only two periods in which such a man might be able to save money. The first was when he first began to earn but could still live with his parents; if he managed to put enough aside, this period might last into early marriage, while his wife too could still bring in a wage, but the birth of children would put paid to it. The second was when his children were old enough to bring in a wage and had not yet left home. Even then, though, they would be near what Rowntree was the first to define as the "poverty line"; there was little spare to cope with illness or other calamity. In other words, the Victorian ideal of a family with a man earning and a wife and children at home did not work for this class, because with few exceptions, one man's wage would not support it. This was crucial, because it meant things could not simply be relied on to sort themselves out; there was something fundamentally wrong with the system. The question was how it could be put right: should wages for men be raised (Rowntree and others thought so) or was the radical feminist Eleanor Rathbone on to something in advocating child allowances? Various committees and commissions would debate these and related questions and methods hotly for the next 50 years, and it is an odd and recurrent theme that the people with the right ideas were often the most abrasive and apt to irritate their fellow-members rather than getting them on board.

One thing the research of people like Booth and Rowntree achieved was to open middle-class and intellectual eyes to a world about which they knew almost nothing and had inaccurately assumed a great deal. Much the same revelation would come to pass during the Second World War, as a result of evacuation, when many well-to-do country people came for the first time into contact with the children of the urban poor and were horrified enough at the state of them to realise that something radical had to be done. This may have been part of the reason for the overwhelming support for the Beveridge proposals shown in a poll by the British Institute of Public Opinion. This support crossed all social boundaries: there was 76% approval in the upper income group and 90% among those who worked in a profession. Henry Durant, the pollster, wrote, sounding slightly bemused, "People's view of whether the Report should be implemented does not seem to have been influenced by their calculation of whether they personally are likely to gain or lose. They seem to have approached the question from the angle of the public good."

The emergence of personalities – from genuinely principled philanthropists like Rowntree through abrasive oddities like Beatrice Webb to Lloyd George and Churchill, both ready to betray any cause at any moment for party advantage – is part of what makes this book much more readable than its academic subject might suggest. The writing style is generally accessible and entertaining. It does have some irritating tics, notably his belief that "as if" can be replaced with "like": phrases such as "it looked like he did not care" grate horribly on the ear and there are a lot of them. But in general he has done a good job of showing what led up to a momentous revolution in ideas of what the state can and should do to make life better for the individual and for society as a whole, and also what a difference this revolution made to people who, for the first time, did not have to decide whether they could afford to call in a doctor, or go about half-blind for lack of spectacles. The book concludes with a timely warning: "Many of those who lived through the war and the difficult decades that preceded it greatly appreciated what had come into being by the end of the 1940s. Yet the generation that followed found it much easier to take for granted something that quickly became central to everyday life in Britain. […] But as the 150 years before the end of the Second World War show, building something like the welfare state is immensely more difficult than allowing it to fall apart."

I've been getting quite worried lately by the number of vox pops, BTL comments and pronouncements on the likes of Twitter (perhaps I should say Twatter) which seem to indicate a growing fear and intolerance of any difference from the perceived norm. It isn't just about immigrants or foreigners, though lord knows they suffer from this; it also affects disabled folk. This is partly the fault of governments and newspapers who have encouraged their dimmer readers to believe everyone in a wheelchair is some kind of fraudster bent on robbing them via the benefits system. But it goes deeper, I think, witness the online conversation I had lately about a man who, some years ago, was wrongly suspected of murder by the press (probably encouraged by the police) and had, quite rightly, received compensation for the injury to his reputation when the real culprit was found. The person on the other side of the conversation was inclined to blame him, because "if he didn't want to be suspected he shouldn't have looked so weird and had an odd hairstyle".

This is why I don't like politicians advocating national unity, coming together, shared values, singing from the same hymn sheet (particularly that metaphor: I don't wish to sing from any hymn sheet, and since I live in a post-enlightenment secular democracy, not a mediaeval theocratic dictatorship, that is my right). But I also want to live in a country where one is not obliged to act like everyone else, fall in behind the majority opinion, or even have a sensible hairstyle. I don't want "unity" if it means conformity, nor "coming together" if it means ironing out difference, rather than learning to tolerate it.

So basically I think all natural-born conformers should have a good listen to Georges Brassens' great song La mauvaise réputation. When the lyric says everyone speaks ill of him except the dumb, everyone kicks out at him except the one-legged, he isn't just making black jokes, he means those who are somehow different from the norm have a natural affinity, unlike the "braves gens" who think everyone should go the same road as them and be exactly like them. For anyone whose French is rusty, here's a rough translation I once did purely for the purpose of singing in the bath.

In the village, without a doubt,
I enjoy an ill repute.
Whatever I do, whatever I say,
I'm looked on as something out of the way.
Yet I do no harm to anyone,
I just want to go on my way alone.
But the good folk hate to be told
Theirs isn't always the only road.
Yes, the good folk hate to be told
Theirs isn't always the only road.
Everybody speaks ill of me,
Except for the dumb, naturally.

When the procession passes by,
I lie in bed and close my eyes.
If they want to have their jubilee,
That's got nothing to do with me.
Yet I do no harm to anyone,
If I do not choose to follow the drum.
But the good folk hate to be told
Theirs isn't always the only road.
Yes, the good folk hate to be told
Theirs isn't always the only road.
Everyone points the finger at me,
(Not those with no arms, naturally).

If I see a kid who's been pinching fruit
Run by with the law in hot pursuit,
I stick out a foot, and strange to say,
It's always the policeman in the way.
Yet I do no harm in anything,
If I help a kid who's been apple-scrumping.
But the good folk hate to be told
Theirs isn't always the only road.
Yes, the good folk hate to be told
Theirs isn't always the only road.
Everybody kicks out at me,
Except the one-legged, naturally.

You don't need the gift of prophecy
To work out what will happen to me.
If they can find a good excuse,
I shall be hanging in a noose
Yet I do no harm to anyone,
If I follow roads that don't lead to Rome.
But the good folk hate to be told
Theirs isn't always the only road.
Yes, the good folk hate to be told
Theirs isn't always the only road.
Everyone'll come to see me die,
Except for the blind, naturally.

The last book I reviewed here was The Unwomanly Face of War , Svetlana Alexievich's account of Russian women who served in World War 2 and what happened to them in its aftermath. Now we have a similar account of "how the women of Paris lived, loved and died in the 1940s" - ie, again in the war and its aftermath.

There are similarities, the most obvious being the attempts for many decades in both France and Russia to airbrush the contribution of women from history. But there are also great differences. Firstly, many of the Russian women were frontline combatants, which Frenchwomen, barring certain resistance fighters, were not (though the definition of "combatant" in postwar France became controversial, since those women who had hidden endangered soldiers and civilians, and often endured the horrors of Ravensbrück for doing so, understandably felt themselves as entitled to the name of combatant as the uniformed men who had put up such a brief resistance to the invader). Secondly, though parts of Russia were occupied, there was no question of "collaborating", even had civilians wished to, because the invader was interested not in coexisting with the locals but in exterminating them. In Paris it was otherwise, which meant there were choices to be made by the inhabitants, and some of these were far from easy. Those in public service might choose to resign their jobs, or stay and try to do them in such a way as best to serve the interests of civilians - though that might also leave them open to the charge of serving the enemy's interests. Rose Valland, volunteer assistant curator at the Jeu de Paume (her sex debarred her from a paid job as curator), stayed on and risked the suspicion, which surfaced briefly after the war, of colluding with the invaders' favourite occupation of looting artwork on a grand scale. What she was in fact doing was secretly keeping records of everything being looted and where it had gone, so that after the war, thousands of artworks could be located and restored to their rightful owners. She also managed, with the Liberation imminent, to notify the Resistance of a trainload of paintings waiting to be despatched by the panicking occupiers, with the result that the train was delayed and captured by the liberators.

Obviously many of the problems female civilians faced in Paris, such as food shortages and moral dilemmas - whether to resist, collaborate or simply keep one's head down - were problems for men as well, and nor were they confined to Paris. The rationale for concentrating on women is twofold. They did have special problems related to their sexual vulnerability and they were in some ways made scapegoats, after the armistice, by men still smarting from their own frontline failures. Sebba remarks of the "tondues", women publicly shaved and humiliated after the liberation for sleeping with Germans, "they were punished by the men who had failed to defend them" and it is true that when you look at the photographs, though there are women in the background it is nearly always men taking the lead. Postwar, too, government ministers, even former resistance fighters among them like Henri Frenay, who knew well the role women had played, were urging them to give up their jobs and let men coming home from prison camps and forced labour return to their role as chef de famille "so that they could regain their lost confidence". This emphasis on the needs of men also exacerbated, for women, the problem that all returning concentration camp survivors faced, namely that nobody wanted to hear what they had suffered. "Don't say anything, they won't understand" as one warned another. The one thing French women did get out of the war was the right to vote, which until 1945 they hadn't had - I must confess I didn't know that and was amazed by it.

The rationale for concentrating on Paris in particular I'm not so sure of, though it seems to be the supposition that Parisiennes are somehow more stylish and clothes-conscious than anyone else. The trouble with that notion is that half the women in this book, though they lived in Paris, were not born there nor even in some cases French nationals. One of the more famous photographs reproduced here was taken by Robert Doisneau in 1948 for the cover of Paris Match: a carelessly elegant young woman sitting on the banks of the Seine, typewriter perched on her knee, writing a novel, the quintessential Parisienne. Since he never spoke to her, he wouldn't have known that she was Emma Smith from London....

There is quite a lot about fashion, reasonably since it was a major industry of the city and the justification for couture houses continuing to operate through the war was that many people would be thrown out of work if they did not. But I did actually get a bit impatient with some of the women's preoccupation with being fashionable at all costs, especially when one reads that "some went as far as to call it 'resisting'" - well, it wasn't. It may have been their way of keeping up their morale but to call it resisting was an impertinence to those who actually were resisting, and risking their lives for others. Karma intervenes at one point when the fascist sympathiser Comtesse de Portes, deciding that even for collaborators an occupied Paris won't be much fun, tries to escape south in a car so overloaded that a hatbox falls from the roof, obscures the driver's view and causes him to hit a tree, killing her instantly. I'm afraid I laughed....

This is a history book with proper notes, bibliography, index etc and a lot of illuminating illustrations. Much of its interest lies in being able to follow individual lives through it, like the incredibly brave Noor Inayat Khan, resistance fighter, and the quiet, dowdy Rose Valland, who didn't much care about fashion or chic, but who preserved so much that was beautiful from thieves and vandals. Even the more dubious characters like Corinne Luchaire, dimwitted teenage actress who collaborates because she doesn't really know how to say no to any man, have their sad fascination. The author is commendably neutral, except where it would be an offence not to take sides. I'm especially glad she did not follow the advice she mentions in the prologue: "When I began this book a male historian suggested I spend hours in the subterranean Bibliothèque Nationale reading the diaries of men like Hervé Le Boterf and Jean Galtier- Boissière." Why yes, how better to discover what women were doing and thinking than to check what men have to say on the subject....

Though accessibly written, this is an academic history with all the expected trimmings: photos, bibliography, and thorough notes. As usual, these are arranged under the various chapter headings, which means that when you want to look one up you must first ascertain the chapter title you're on and then scrabble through the notes to find it. I saw a history book recently that included the relevant page numbers from the text at the top of each page of notes, making it so much easier to look up the notes while reading the text. I'd recommend that practice to all writers of annotated books.

This is a "micro-history" which illuminates a bigger story, namely the relationship between Britain and Germany in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, via one small place, a much-disputed island in the North Sea. It belonged at various times to Denmark, Britain and Germany and while the latter two owned it, there were constant influxes of tourists, political agitators, spies, artists, construction workers and military men to unsettle the original population of fisherfolk. The entire population was evacuated twice, in connection with the world wars; the Germans twice turned it into an armed camp and the British attempted to blow it into oblivion, though amazingly it's still there.

Not surprisingly, the Heligolanders themselves had very little notion of loyalty to any of the various nations who made use of them and their island for their own purposes, and quite sensibly spent their time playing one off against the other. They seem to have always had an innate reluctance to paying taxes or duties of any kind and managed to avoid doing so under the British, the Kaiser, Weimar and even the Nazis; indeed the place is still a tax-free zone.

What this book left me with, in fact, was a keen desire to know more about the Heligolanders themselves, this original population who kept vanishing behind the myths others created around them, not to mention the influxes of outsiders. In particular I'd have liked to know more about how they adapted on their return in the 1950s to a place that had been reconstructed from scratch and, needless to say, not in the way they themselves had favoured. The photos from various eras are fascinating, but none shows the island and its buildings as they are today, which seems a pity.

However, it would not be a fair criticism of this book to say that it concentrates too little on the Heligolanders, because its whole purpose is to discuss, through the history of the island, the relationship between Britain and Germany and their contest for supremacy in the North Sea. This it does very thoroughly and readably; the fact that it left me wanting to know more about a quite different aspect of things is a bonus.

A small poem I just wrote for the encouragment of revolutionaries

Ça Ira

It'll be fine, it'll be okay,
they sang as they swung on down the road
to make the world work a better way.

Freedom, equality, brotherhood,
everyone's dream, how could it fail,
once they'd cleared out the dead wood.

Only the axe was under a spell,
chopped and chopped and never let up,
like something out of a fairy tale,

and when they finally made it stop,
nobody had any appetite
for freedom; no one could handle hope.

It'll be fine, it'll be all right,
except that for now they've all slunk back
to where they were, or maybe not quite.

Perhaps just a small step down the track
can make a difference next time they try;
perhaps every ship that goes to wrack

is wood for a better. It could be
that men become wiser, that they shun
the evil they know, that history

is the tale of progress. Then again,
they might be like the vomiting cur
from the Bible. Yet… it'll be fine,

they sing, after every ruinous war,
each tyranny, pogrom, disastrous choice.
The axe chops on, till they remember

the magic words: poll, armistice,
uprising. Then they hand out freedom,
give folk doctoring, schooling, a voice,

welcome strangers into their home,
seeing their brothers. Though they turn
again to their folly, still it would seem

there's something in them that longs to learn,
that gropes for light, yet flinches away,
loving the glow, fearing the burn.

It'll be fine, it'll be okay,
freedom, equality, brotherhood,
it'll be fine, just not today.

Another anthology. This is an edited version of a website of the same name, a collection of poems which came into being because of the 2015 general election. The swing to the right, against the predictions of opinion polls, surprised most poets, who, like nearly everyone else, live in an online bubble where we come across few world-views that do not mirror our own. Two poets, the editors of this anthology, decided to publish a poem a day for 100 days in response to the election (it turned into 138 days, but poets aren't usually big on maths). Some were commissioned from poets the editors knew or knew of, others came from open submission. Disclosure: I have a poem in it myself but am taking my usual stance that one poem doesn't disqualify me from reviewing a whole anthology.

It might be argued that commissioning poems from the editors' own online acquaintance would produce homogeneity of views, but apparently the open submissions were no less homogenous (as I know was the case in a later project on poems about Brexit: not a single pro-Brexit poem was submitted). Why there should be this political consensus among poets is a puzzle many have raised. If one accepts that the role of poets in society, rather than to be unacknowledged legislators, is to be gadflies, it seems natural that they should be anti-whatever government is in power, and indeed anti-establishment. But that doesn't wholly explain the leftist consensus. Either right-wing poets, these days, don't exist, or they don't write about politics, or if they do, they avoid projects like this. The introduction, if I've understood it correctly, suggests that right-wingers, being more pragmatic, may not bother with the lyric form as a way of influencing or persuading others, ie for political purposes, because its reach is too small. I'm not sure about this, but then neither am I sure I have the hang of its argument elsewhere, eg "By dividing the work according to the four ministries […] in Nineteen Eighty-Four, we are not just having a dig at the attitudes of the political class […] but also indicating that the opinions expressed in these pages are not without their own ideologies". I don't really see how the second follows from the first (though I thought the idea of the four sections quite a witty way to organise the book) and overall the intro reminds me of an old North Wales man's reply when asked his opinion of the sermons preached by his local vicar, the poet R S Thomas. He said, "He do pitch the hay too high in the crach", meaning the sermons went over his head. Some of this intro's hay is out of my reach, too.

If the poems are largely homogenous in their political stance, they are, thankfully, not at all so in their technique. They range from overtly polemical to very oblique, from free verse to complicated and elaborate forms (both classical and invented), from contemporary to historical parallel, from persona to personal. Some of the form poems particularly impressed me, because the technique turned out, in this instance, to be a way of making the reader think more carefully about the words and their import. I would cite as outstanding Hannah Lowe's use of bold type to create a poem-within-a-poem in "The Garden Is Not For Everyone", Ian McMillan's similar use of italicised unspoken thought in "News From't Northern Province" and Paul McGrane's variant villanelle "The Government" – I seldom warm to villanelles, but this is a perfect example of how to turn the form's repetition and inevitability to account, stressing over and over the unpalatable fact that "somebody voted for the government". There are many other forms represented: sonnets, ballads, ghazal, terza rima, sestina. I'm still trying to work out why Ben Wilkinson, in his lively sestina "Building a Brighter, More Secure Future" chose the indefinite article "a" as one of his keywords. He must have had some purpose in deliberately choosing so weak a word in so strong a place, but so far I'm not getting it; more reading needed…

Another technique that worked very well in some of these poems was mythologizing, which gives a universality and timelessness to what might otherwise be bounded by its own particular time and place. Jon Stone's "Incentivampire" is a splendid, memorable example, as is Tony Williams's terza rima "The Promised Land" (another happy marriage of form and theme, a form and journey both potentially without an end).

I don't think all these poems can have been written specifically for the project, or during the hundred days; some must have been to hand already and simply fitted the brief. For instance, Steve Ely's "Inyenzi", one of the most powerful poems I've read in recent years, was in his pamphlet Werewolf (Calder Valley Poetry, 2016, reviewed here and though the timing would allow for it to have been written for this project, it seems so integral to the pamphlet, so much part of its pattern, that I can't believe it evolved outside it. Not that this matters, because his transfer of the rhetoric used in Rwanda, to dehumanise the Tutsi and justify their killing, to a persona in this country speaking of what's sometimes called the underclass is chilling, masterly and fits the brief perfectly.

Nevertheless
they seemed to find each other attractive
mating continually and without compunction,
Even the juveniles were fertile

There are some poems that seem more tangential to the theme than this. In some cases, like Josephine Dickinson's "Go Not, Gentle", they are less a reaction to a specific event than a way of seeing the world, but still capable of being seen as a response to the theme. It's also possible that many poets preferred to approach the theme in an oblique way rather than risk being overtly polemical. There were a few poems that made me feel preached at, and correspondingly resentful, but not many. Overall, it's an anthology with much energy and passion, as is natural with political poetry, but also with more nuance and subtlety than might have been expected.

Generally I choose new books to review on the blog. This time I'm reviewing a book published 18 years ago, quite simply because it's still one of the ones I read most often.

Stevie Davies is a noted novelist, but this is a history book, dealing indeed with the same period that inspired one of her best novels, Impassioned Clay. It is fascinating for a writer to see how she transmutes fact into fiction, but you don't need to be a writer to find this particular period of history absorbing. The subtitle is "Women of the English Revolution: 1640-1660". That twenty years, in fact, when the world turned upside down, when kings could be unkinged, and indeed un-headed, when a country was trying to find a different way to function, and when for a glorious couple of decades, before England relapsed into forelock-tugging mode, nobody knew his or her place.

His or her, for though Cromwell's government was no less inimical to women's rights than Charles's had been, it was a time when the voiceless in general found their voice, and no section of society was more voiceless than women. A married woman, feme coverte in law, had no legal existence, her identity being "covered" by her husband's. Even fewer women could vote than men, and a man without a vote could at least make his voice heard in other ways without much risk of some of the penalties that attended women's speaking. When the Leveller women petitioned Parliament in the 1640s and 50s, their petitions were refused simply on the ground that they were women, and politics was not their concern; they had best, the Serjeant-at-Arms advised, "return to your own business, your housewifery".

But these women were the likes of Katharine Chidley, pamphleteer and disputant, who was not about to be silenced or sidelined so easily:

"Since we are assured of our creation in the image of God, and of an interest in Christ equal unto men, as also of a proportionable share in the freedoms of this commonwealth, we cannot but wonder and grieve that we should appear so despicable in your eyes as to be thought unworthy to petition or represent our grievances to this honourable House. Have we not an equal interest with the men of this nation in those liberties and securities contained in the Petition of Right, and other the good laws of the land? Are any of our lives, limbs, liberties, or goods to be taken from us more than from men?"

There are many glorious voices in this book, and they aren't all female, for this is not a men-versus-women sort of book, and many men are praised in it. Men in advance of the time, like Daniel Rogers and George Fox, were encouraging women to speak out, even to preach. Daniel Rogers's marriage manual, Matrimonial Honour, would have looked radical centuries later:

"She is always in grief & that for thee, & by thy means; what day, week, month is she free through the year, breeding, bearing, watching her babes. […] She had need to be eased of all that is easable, because she cannot be eased of the rest. Get her asleep, if thou can, but awake her not, till she please."

Less radical men, like the diarist Ralph Josselin, were doing their best to be decent husbands in a society which they dimly perceived was very unequal and in many ways unfair to their partners. There are some moving stories of marriages: the Josselins, growing apart as they lose child after child, John and Elizabeth Lilburne becoming embittered not only with Parliament but with each other.

Some of the women who found their voices most powerfully at this time were Quakers, and their fortitude and daring are both inspiring and terrifying. Barbara Blaugdone, schoolteacher, forsakes her middle-class comforts and sleeps in ditches, an itinerant preacher. Mary Fisher travels to Turkey to convert the Sultan – he was bemused but civil, unlike the privileged but ungentlemanly students of Sidney Sussex, Cambridge, who threw stones at her. Mary Dyer, reprieved at the last moment on a scaffold in Massachusetts, promptly returns to the job and is executed.

And there's Anna Trapnel, Fifth Monarchist prophetess, writer of execrable poetry and blessed with a voice that can out-sing and out-shout any heckler. Anna arguably has kangaroos in the top paddock, but listen to her answering the magistrate who questions her motives in travelling from London to Cornwall (an enterprise that could easily get one labelled a vagabond or troublemaker; governments have always liked to limit movement):

"But why did you come into this country?"
"Why might not I come here, as well as into another country?"
"But you have no lands, nor livings, nor acquaintance to come to in this country."
"What though I had not? I am a single person, and why may I not be with my friends anywhere?"
"I understand you are not married."
"Then, having no hindrance, why may not I go where I please, if the Lord so will?"

It is almost impossible not to cheer. It's a sensation that is repeated many times in the course of this book. Though there are sadnesses in it, in the end one is left inspired by these women who simply would not keep quiet. The book can still be found, and I'd urge anyone, not only those interested in history or feminism, to get hold of it.

Steve Ely's first collection, Oswald's Book of Hours (Smokestack Books 2013) was shortlisted for the Forward first collection prize and I reviewed it on this blog. His second, Englaland, came out from Smokestack in 2015 – also reviewed here.

Matins: Annunciation

Force eight from Lundy and the Irish Sea
in the dark moon of the solstice.
Alarmed awake at midnight, sleet slashing
across the window glass, blurring the street-lit world.
Packing the van in drenched Jack Pyke:
Lazerlight lamp-kit, slip-leads, dogs.
The long drive east to the ditch-cut flatlands.
Sleet strafing down. Wind howling in the hawthorns.
Shivering long-dogs, ears erect. The thousand foot
halogen beam. Green eyes in hedge-bottoms.
Transfixed conies. Dogs running down the beam.
Conies dangling in the Deben double V.
Back to the van. Bag the necked and bladdered conies.
Towel and box the dogs. Peel off the drenched Jack Pyke.
The cold drive home in the dark moon of the solstice,
sleet slurring the view through the wiping-windscreen,
blurring the headlamped world.

(From Oswald's Book of Hours)

SHEENAGH: Your work is clearly very rooted in a particular landscape, and every point in that landscape's history seems equally present to you – there aren't many ways in which you remind me of Cavafy, but one resemblance I do see is how people like Oswald of Northumbria and Nevison the highwayman are still alive in your mental and emotional territory, just as Cavafy evidently wouldn't have been surprised to turn a corner in Alexandria and bump into Mark Antony or a priest from the Serapeion. How long has this sense of past-in-present been with you, and informing your work?

STEVE: The sense of past-in-present, as you put it, has been with me for as long as I can remember. As a kid I’d attempt to imagine the layerings of the past that had shaped the various aspects of the landscapes I roamed in — how the fields and woods became, the backstories of footpaths, copses, ponds and valleys. This tendency became more intense and urgent in my teens as reading began to inform and transform my experiences of place — and as my experiences of place began to similarly inform and transform my reading. That dialectic enabled the development of an imagined historical perspective that contextualised and sacralised that which had hitherto been quotidian — particular trees, meadows, views — or whole topographies. As this tendency developed, I came to see landscape as something akin to a living organism embodying a transgenerational integrity in which the past was inexorably alive in the present.
Two books were particularly important in this development. The first was Aaron Wilkinson’s A History of South Kirkby. (South Kirkby is the place I was brought up in. I’ve spend most of my life in the area.) I first read the book aged around fifteen and it sent me rambling around my local area (and into my local libraries as I followed up Wilkinson’s bibliography) with fresh eyes, triangulating landscape with past people and events and enabling me to connect my parish with a larger history (the Danelaw, the Norman Conquest, the Peasant’s Revolt, the Wars of the Roses, enclosure and the English & Industrial Revolutions).
Arthur Ruston & Denis Witney’s Hooton Pagnell: The Evolution of a Yorkshire Village (1934), also became important to my sense of the present in the past. The Hooton Pagnell estate was the main poaching/bird-nesting territories territory of my youth. I knew every hawthorn bush and rat-hole of that estate. I didn’t encounter Ruston and Witney until I was well into my twenties, but the millennial scope of the book provided an account of the landscape that allowed me to see my personal experiences in and around the village (and the neighbouring Frickley Estate) as part of a continuous parade of human activity from the Yorkshire Danes Swein and Arketil, to the planting of Frickley pit. I discovered, for example, that ‘Badger Balk’, (the widest of the three footpaths that joined Hooton’s Back Lane with the Iron Age route of Lound Lane) was so-called not simply because it was the haunt of meles meles, but because it was the only place within the parish where itinerant pedlars (‘Badgers’) had rights to graze their horses. But Badger Balk was much more than that. It was also part of a luminous and numinous personal landscape. Where it terminated at Four-Lane-Ends, the ivied elders were clotted with the ragged nests of spuggies, and foxes earthed under field stone dumped in the broad hedge-bottoms. Immediately beyond was Deep Dale, until recently an isolated valley too steep too plough, an oasis of orchids and harebells in an agrochemical waste. Richard Rolle, the hermit of nearby Hampole and confessor to the nuns at its Cistercian Priory, had his ‘shack in the fields’ very near here — the place where lazerlight lamps strafe the midnight stubbles in search of loping Puss and where Robert Aske’s forty thousand marched past bannered under Wounds, en-route to their great camp at Scawsby.
All my landscapes are transformed into quasi-sacred landscapes by a mythopoeic coalescence of experience, reading and imagination. The sacred landscape of Brierley Common, between South Kirkby, Brierley, Hemsworth, Grimethorpe and Great Houghton informs much of Englaland. Richard Rolle’s Hampole underpins my current work-in-progress, Incendium Amoris. Almost every day I walk my dogs down ‘the lines’ (the disused railway lines) near where I live in Upton. But I’m not just walking ‘the lines’. Almost every stride is resonant with historical, personal or other significance. The place where I cross the road to join the path is where, in 1973, nine-year-old Colin Bryant was killed by a car whilst playing ‘chicken’ on the highway. Across the road, behind the old station master’s house, a tawny owl nests in a magpie’s abandoned drey. A looted brick platform is all that remains of the station, formerly a halt on the Hull to Barnsley line which fell to Beeching’s axe in the railway-killing sixties.
Walking on, I pass the scrubby, sparrowhawk-patrolled woodland from which jays and little owls call and where, for one unbelievable weekend last May, a nightingale hymned in the dusk. It was in that wood, in 1981, that I stumbled across a turtle dove’s nest — the last nest I ever found of that species, now extinct in the North. A hundred yards further and the path spurs off to North Elmsall, where in the seventies a seal of Pope Honorius III was turned from the tilth and where the highwayman John Nevison would hold court in the White Hart, a now-vanished coaching inn on the Wakefield-London road. Past a patch of wild raspberry is the site of the short-lived Upton Colliery, opened in the thirties and closed by the sixties, now re-shaped into Upton Country Park, where cuckoos chase and call each spring. The fishing pond, margined in loosestrife, phragmites and flag, is fed by the spring known as Thunder Hole, which roars from the scrub below Luke Farmer’s memorial garden. Luke was killed in Afghanistan in 2010, aged 19. I used to go out with his Dad’s cousin. Along the cutting, where lads in Jack Pyke send ferrets into setts that travel deep into the fissured limestone, is the hamlet of Wrangbrook, until the sixties the site of an important railway junction where three now defunct rail-lines met. There kids converge to shake down conkers, last year I gathered a stone of blackberries, and sometime in the late fourteenth century, a paralytic got up and walked after praying to Saint Richard. Beyond is Skelbrooke, where John Little is graved interred in the Archangel’s graveyard, a few hundred yards below Robin Hood’s Well. This land lives and its dead cannot die. It’s as wrong to build a bypass or a Tesco on this land as it is to kill a tiger to grind into Chinese Viagra.

SHEENAGH: I can see why you say that, but could it not be said that while tigers are finite, land goes on for ever, and what you're proposing there is to freeze its ongoing history, of which you're so conscious in the poems, at one arbitrary point? Saxons recycled Roman walls, mediaeval farmers re-used once-sacred stones as barn floors. The sacredness and history of this particular land is obvious to you because you know it, but in all probability there's hardly a square yard of the country of which the same couldn't be said by someone who knew it well, and we can hardly ban building everywhere.... Since I spend much of my life regretting that I didn't become an archaeologist, my own inclination is to preserve everything, but doesn't that, in itself, go against the concept of landscape as a living organism, which is never done changing and developing?

STEVE: What I’m against is total or careless destruction for no good reason. As far as I can see there is never a good reason to build a Tesco or a bypass. My local authority put a new bypass (‘link- road’) near Upton a few years ago, using European money. The same local authority had rejected spending its own money on the same road twenty years previously because the cost of the road ‘was not justified by the usual standards of highway economics’. That is, it wasn’t necessary. The avowed reason for the road was to complete the A1-M1 link road (to open up land for development) and more specifically open up the former pit site of South Kirkby Colliery for development (even though it already had excellent road access). I protested against the plans and proposals both times. The road has bisected the largest swathe of open, undeveloped farmland in the local area, soaked the countryside in traffic roar, taken out some woodland, cut across the route of several footpaths and has brought anti-social behaviour into the countryside (joy-riding, destruction of paths, fields and hedges by off-roaders). On the plus side, HGVs can get from the A1 to the M1 three minutes faster than hitherto and the Colliery site now has a back door as well as a front door. As long as our political leaders are committed to growth (economic and population; the two come together, by definition), development never stops and the land is continually subject to creeping industrialisation and suburbanisation. (I recently saw a photograph of the land between South Elmsall and Upton (where I live) dating from about 1955. There was about a mile and a half of clear space — woodland, pasture, arable. Sixty years later, the gap is about three hundred yards). It’s not about opposing change and development, but learning to value what we have, becoming conscious of landscape, nature, and ‘heritage’, and subjecting development to local, democratic control. Ultimately, we need to reduce the population, end sprawl and restore the land.

SHEENAGH: You're very unafraid of words. That sounds an odd thing to say of a poet, but I've read so many reviewers, in particular, who seem downright terrified of any vocabulary vaguely out of the ordinary. Use an esoteric or archaic word and they'll complain of elitism; use modern slang and it's condemned as unsuitable or a "duff note", as if modern argot and poetry were somehow incompatible. One of the things I like best about your work is how you cheerfully expect your readers to cope with liturgical language, Latin, Anglo-Saxon, umpteen bird and plant names, lovely obscure words like xanthic for yellow, and you mix that in with army slang, business jargon, politician's soundbites….

STEVE: Words are my business, and as such, every word, in every language — past, present and future — belongs to me. I’ll use them as I see fit. Relatively early in my poetic second-coming I was expressly warned-off from using the word ‘cerulean’ by a well-meaning would-be mentor. My response was to write a poem (‘fancy THAT’, from my unpublished book, the compleat eater) that deliberately and provocatively deployed the word. Since I began to write again in 2003, I’ve used a range of registers, vocabularies and languages — Yorkshire dialect, the cant of U.S. prison gangs, Calo (the Hispanic ‘creole’ of East Los Angeles) , and many more, including the examples you cite. In ‘The Song of the Yellowhammer’ (Englaland) I also use two Romani words, ‘sunakai’ and ‘salno’, which both connote ‘yellow’. In the stanza of the same poem in which I use the word ‘xanthic’ there are five other evocations of ‘yellow’. I’m trying to make it golden.

SHEENAGH: Indeed yes. It felt to me as if what you were doing in Song of the Yellowhammer was trying to wrap the landscape in a sort of golden haze. In metaphorical terms that isn't a million miles from a sepia wash, and I did wonder if you ever worried about attracting the criticism George Mackay Brown sometimes encountered, namely that he over-idealised the past of his chosen landscape? Especially since, near the end, in the verse beginning "Cut the vines", you seem to hint, albeit less apocalyptically, at something akin to what he says in his essay on Rackwick: "I do not think Rackwick will remain empty for ever. It could happen that the atom-and-planet horror at the heart of our civilisation will scatter people again to the quiet beautiful fertile places of the world". Which alarmed me at the time, because he sounded as if he thought a nuclear holocaust would be a small price to pay for such an outcome... In your poem, the lines

To each man his allotment.
With plough-turned fieldstone
gentled hands will build
once more, and lift the lintels of long-tumbled halls

sounded more elegiac, like a dream of what had once been but you knew could never actually happen again (certainly not if the average digging and building skills of the population are anything like mine). Leastways, that was how I read that poem; was I right to, or were you seeing not just a desired but a possible future?

STEVE: The gold is the gold of the yellowhammer, a symbol for ‘the people in the land’, the real treasure, not the lucre zealously guarded by Fafnir or sought by Sigurdr. Also in my use of ‘goldenness imagery’ I intended to give luminosity to the landscape itself, which is the other treasure — and perhaps to knowingly evoke an imagined, past-and-perhaps-once-again, ‘golden age’. I think the juxtapositions with violent and quotidian elements and the poem’s engagement, argument and tension guards against any simpering to sepia. My own, more cowardly version of Mackay Brown’s sentiment is summarised later in the poem. ‘Too much blood, I can’t commit.’ I’m intuiting and assuming that the wrenching away from capitalism necessary for sustainable living, conservation, the full development of human potential and social justice will lead to upheaval and slaughter as the rich and powerful choose to scorch the Earth and immolate its peoples rather than concede their dominance. That fact that I ‘can’t commit’ makes my anarcho-yeoman utopianism a prophetic, not political vision. However, I do think yeoman-anarchism is a possible future (perhaps the only sustainable one). Those with the means to downsize, go off-grid and opt-out are approximating to a fragile, individualised and ultimately unsustainable version of it right now. On a wider, societal level, some form of revolution would be necessary. What kind and where it might come from I have no idea. But the alternative is the totalitarianism of plutocracy and the commoditisation of everything: death for the sake of profit.

SHEENAGH: How did your language become so rich and multi-layered, and have you ever had trouble getting it past editors?

STEVE: At one level, the reason why I deploy such a wide range of registers and lexicons is because I have a wide range of interests and obsessions — football, birding, hunting, nature, history, England, the Bible, religion, Catholicism, the occult, crime, the Fen, radical and revolutionary politics and so on — and the content, vocabulary and mode of expression characteristic to each area all find their way into my work. However, behind both Oswald’s Book of Hours and Englaland is a vision of England in which fifteen hundred years of history, culture and language exist simultaneously as an irreducible synoptic unity; my ‘interests and obsessions’ are filtered through this vision, producing the diversity of language, forms and range of reference that characterises both books. Ultimately, the heteroglossic mode of Oswald & Englaland is as much a product of ideology as accident or aesthetics.
I’ve often suspected that the relative unorthodoxy of my work has alienated the more provincial (Kavanagh’s usage) editors but I don’t really know this for sure. My editor at Smokestack Books, Andy Croft, has said that ‘only Smokestack’ would have published Oswald’s Book of Hours, and he might be right.

SHEENAGH: "Since I began to write again in 2003" – yes, I gathered from your website that you'd taken a break from writing and then come back to it. What made that happen, and if you actually stopped writing altogether, how else did you express the thoughts and concerns that feel so urgent in your recent work?

STEVE: I stopped writing when I went to University in 1988. I’d been writing poetry for five or six years and had reached a decent standard and had begun to think of myself as a ‘good’ poet. I think the energy I’d hitherto been putting into writing simply went into my studies. I also became very active in the Green Party about that time, so that might also have played a role in sucking up my time. In 1992 I left the Greens, joined the Socialist Workers Party — and became a secondary school teacher. My creativity was channelled into pedagogy and selling papers on the street. In the mid-1990s I began to read a lot of true crime and crime fiction. I made two abortive attempts to write thrillers. But in the period 1988-2003 I didn’t write any poetry at all — and barely read any. I left the SWP in 1996 and became politically quiescent. I’ve remained so to this day. (I don’t count simply ‘having opinions’, even on social media (or in poems), as being politically engaged — you’ve got to join, campaign, organise, commit, sacrifice.) I don’t think I expressed myself at all creatively during that period. Maybe that’s why I’ve been so prolific since starting up again. I’ve got years of stored-up unconscious to download.

SHEENAGH: Glad to hear it! Your poems don't shy away from politics or indeed polemic. I know you feel the past is always in the present anyway, but do you use historical parallels to get some distance from the subject, to approach it from an angle rather than head-on?

STEVE: Not consciously, although I do affirm the past to critique the present. I’ve just written a Corpus Christi play, The Coronation of the Virgin. The play addresses modern themes: it’s an affirmation and exploration of the irrational in the context of the ‘New Atheism’s’ scorched earth kulturkampf against ‘religion’. However, it’s set in first century A.D. Palestine and written in an approximation to an early sixteenth century style — alliterative blank verse — which I suppose is a political choice in itself.
Having said that, I rarely set out to write a ‘political poem’; however, because my poetry is engaged (that is it proceeds from vision and position) there is often a political (or at least public) dimension to it. My poem ‘Spearhafoc’, for example, began as an attempt to evoke the spirit of the sparrowhawk (in response to a particularly striking photograph of the bird), but as it stands is largely a defiant affirmation of a specific kind of working-class outlawry; I didn’t intend that. It’s just that the network of associations sparked off by ‘sparrowhawk’ include the Book of St. Albans, A Kestrel for a Knave, Kes, trespass, poaching, egg collecting, eyass ‘scrumping’ and the violence and confrontations which are inevitably associated with and follow from those things. In some sections of Englaland’s ‘Mongrel Blood Imperium’, I consciously adopted a less ‘poetic’, more direct and contemporary voice in order to present arguments, expose the faltering in my process and to convey uncertainty and bewilderment (and also to give some relief from the intensity and pace that otherwise characterised that 200 page poem. Overall, I think the decision was the right one. However, the shift to a more direct register, motivated by political as much as aesthetic considerations, came at the cost of music and a dilution of the linguistic resource. A more oblique approach gives greater space in which the imagination can roam and provides a greater range of resources to appropriate.

SHEENAGH: You use a lot of different forms – offhand I can think of ballads, unrhymed sonnets, alliterative verse, prose-poems in various formats. How does a poem, or a sequence of poems, find its ideal form, the one that feels right to you?

STEVE: I generally plan what I’m going to do, taking into account theme, content, language, intention, etc. Oswald’s Book of Hours was modelled on the structure of a mediaeval Book of Hours, which generally open with a Calendar (of Holy Days, etc), proceed via a formalised sequence of prayers and Psalms and conclude with ‘Memorials to the Saints’. Having settled on this general structure, I then proceeded on a utilitarian, practical basis (one of my major aims was simply to prevent the book becoming too long), hence the large number of short, sonnet-like poems — deciding to write a sonnet is my way of telling myself to keep it brief. My unpublished collection, the compleat eater was conceived of partially as a provocative comment on form — it’s written in unpunctuated and justified columns of lower case text and defines itself as poetry via rhythm, compression and lexis. ‘The Song of the Yellowhammer’ is an improvised form, its nine line stanzas, with the last line being much longer than the rest, is being a stylisation of the traditional rendering of the nine-syllable song of the yellowhammer — ‘a little bit of bread and no cheeeeeese’.
However, although I am and will always be a planner, I’m increasingly giving myself flexibility within the broad outline of any given plan. My work-in-progress Incendium Amoris is planned and structured and has movement and direction. However, within the broad intention, I’m giving myself considerable heuristic freedom in executing the various poems. I haven’t always done this; I haven’t always thought it necessary to. Oswald’s Book of Hours for example, was planned poem-by-poem, in great detail. I stuck to the plan throughout, with very few departures. ‘Werewolf’, my just-completed pamphlet-length sequence, was similarly very tightly planned and has a quite intricate organisational structure. However, the general trend in my work is for looser planning and greater spontaneity. Having said that, I’m increasingly interested in identifying forms that might complement my ‘English idiom’ and to that end I’ve begun to explore and experiment. I’m becoming particularly interested in ballad forms, odes, sprung rhythm, the Arabic qasida (I’ve just written an alliterative poem based on an Old English charm in a qasida-derived form) and in techniques (parallelism, repetition, lexical economy) used in the various English Bibles.

SHEENAGH: Yes, while Oswald's Book of Hours actually was laid out like a mediaeval book of devotions, Englaland was far looser and longer, and I know its published form wasn't, for space reasons, quite what you had planned, but what sort of a shape did you see it as being?

STEVE: Englaland was conceived of (in 2009, when I started writing it) as the thing it became, a wide-ranging epic that affirms, uncovers, critiques and transforms ideas of England and Englishness. The intention was to create a number of pamphlet-length sequences or long poems that could stand alone, but that would also be in thematic and other relation to each other, mutually commenting on, reinforcing and illuminating and thus creating a unity in which the whole would be greater than the sum of its parts. Englaland was planned and structured quite carefully from the beginning, although it did develop. Oswald’s Book of Hours, for example was originally planned to be a section of Englaland, but it grew too long for the piece. ‘Big Billy’ was originally the centre-piece of a five poem alliterative sequence (‘Feast’) about the Good Friday fair at Brierley Common, but it grew to dominate the other poems (in terms of length) so much that I discarded the others. ‘The Song of the Yellowhammer’ was a relatively late addition to the plan and ‘The Ballad of Scouse McLaughlin’ had to be sacrificed at the proof stage due to reasons of space — which grieved me no end, because all the component parts of the book are integral. If there is ever a reprint, I’d like to reincorporate ‘Scouse’, although that will probably add another fifteen or twenty pages to the book.

SHEENAGH: Both your collections have been very male worlds. In Oswald's Book of Hours, the only females I recall being spoken of with affection or respect were the Virgin Mary and various lurchers, and in fact there were several references to women that could be seen as casually misogynist, which was fair enough since they were in the voice of Nevison, who could hardly speak like a New Man. There was one in Englaland that bothered me a bit more, because though it was in a ballad about Nevison, it was in a narrator's voice: "he robbed the rich, man and bitch". If that had been, say, "cur and bitch", it'd be just the natural resentment of the poor against the rich. But it uses a neutral word for the male victim and a loaded, pejorative one for the female. What's the rationale there? And do you see your poetry continuing to be so male-dominated?

STEVE: Quite a few people have commented on the male world of these two books and gently implied that there may be misogyny at work. I’ve just had a quick trawl through Oswald’s Book of Hours and noted (in addition to Our Lady and the various female lurchers and long dogs) ‘affectionate or respectful’ references to Mary Tudor & Elizabeth Barton (‘Obsecro te’ & ‘O intemerata’), the un-named Flemish girl in ‘Beati, quorum remissae’, my daughter in the first poem of ‘Hours of the Dead’, Mary Magdalen in the poem of that name in ‘Memorials of the Saints’ and Margaret of Kirkeby in ‘Richard Rolle’. A similar trawl through Englaland reveals ‘affectionate or respectful’ references to ‘a girl’ in poem ‘X’ of ‘The Battle of Brunanburh’; ‘domestics and milkmaids’ in poem ‘XXI’; there are ‘affectionate’ if not ‘respectful’ references to women (and men) in ‘Eight Miles Out’; Lady Julia Warde-Aldam turns up in ‘Reverend John Harnett Jennings'; there are incidental but ‘respectful’ references to women in ‘The Field Church, Frickley’; ‘the booze-loosened lasses’ of ‘Big Billy’ are portrayed ‘affectionately’ and, I think ‘respectfully’; ‘Krakumal’ is Ragnar’s death-bed paean to his wife, Aslaug (Kraka); several women are mentioned in ‘Irish Blood, English Heart’ and ‘Mrs Duffy’ gets a poem to herself. So maybe there are more ‘positive’ or at least ‘neutral’ references to women than you think.
The specific reference you make to possible casual misogyny (in ‘A Lytle Gest of John Nevison’), in which the narrator uses the term ‘bitch’ in lieu of ‘woman’, may actually be compounded by his subsequent reference to the innkeeper’s adulterous wife as a ‘whore’. However, the narrator of ‘A Lytle Gest of John Nevison’ is a working-class raconteur of a certain type, an outlaw and provocateur himself , hymning his hero’s deviance in a deliberately scandalous way, variously praising his hero’s fecklessness, his penchant for armed robbery and running protection rackets, his contempt for the rich, his treachery, womanising and reckless cunning. The poem ends with the narrator himself threatening the audience. The narrator’s possible misogyny is part of a range of disreputable attitudes he owns.
Of course, at a more basic level, I needed a rhyme for ‘rich’ and ‘bitch’ fitted the bill. I’m not sure my narrator would’ve used ‘cur’, though; ‘cur’ is not really in the vernacular as a synonym for ‘man’ the same way that ‘bitch’ (however much you might deplore it) is for ‘woman’. A few years ago I got into a similar minor controversy with some fellow writers over the use of racist terms by one of my narrators and some of my characters in my unpublished (the various poems were published in magazines and journals) book, JerUSAlem. One of the major themes of JerUSAlem is race and racism in the context of the ‘American Dream’ and concepts of the USA as ‘promised land’. Some of my characters and narrators were racists of various stripes and this was reflected in their language. I don’t see that giving scandalous utterances to scandalous voices is a problem.
However, to return to your fundamental point, both collections are undoubtedly very male worlds. Why is my world a male world? I suppose the content and themes of Oswald and Englaland — warfare, fighting, hunting, poaching, outlawry, revolution and so on — are bound to import a male bias. Plus, I am a man. I suppose I write about manly things. Looking at my most recent work: Bloody, proud and murderous men, adulterers and enemies of God is ‘very male’; given that its subject is violence, war, terrorism and genocide, it was always likely to be. Incendium Amoris is essentially ‘about love’, and as such is more balanced, genderwise. Enganche is about football. Ten poems in, it’s a very male world indeed. It’s just the way it is. I would never consciously attempt to compensate. I don’t write to be representative. I write because I’m obsessive-compulsive.

SHEENAGH: "I don’t see that giving scandalous utterances to scandalous voices is a problem." No indeed, and I wish to heaven that more readers would see the difference between narrative and character voice. As Chaucer says,

whoso will tell a tale after a man,
he moot reherce, as ny as ever he can,
everich word, if it be in his charge,
al speak he never so rudeliche and at large

Having said that, of course the sly old soul knew very well that it was he, the author, who chose his narrators and their tones and attitudes. I suppose it's the tone of some of your narrators' comments on women, rather than what they actually say, that sticks in the mind. Admittedly there's room for different interpretations: for instance "big-bosomed" could be glossed as "maternal" or "nurturing" rather than "belongs on Page 3", while "booze-loosened lasses" maybe sounds affectionate in a male ear but contemptuous in a female one? But what I'm really getting at is the clear, unconditional love that shows in the voices of your male narrators when they talk of their dogs, and which I don't hear elsewhere. It reminds me of when R S Thomas, in his autobiography, speaks of goldcrests: "I dote on them, the pretty little things". This comes as a terrific surprise, because he never says anything half so affectionate about his own wife and son (whose conception is explained in the sentence "The vicar's wife had expressed a desire for a child"). I don't suppose that means he didn't have feelings for them but he seems to have saved all his own expressiveness for the goldcrests. Hey, maybe I've been coming at this from the wrong angle; is it that your male narrators, too, feel less embarrassed expressing sentiments for animals?

STEVE: ‘Big-bosomed’ alludes to the comment Richard Rolle made to Margaret of Kirkeby during one of their conversations — that she had ‘gret papys’. She was a nun, he her spiritual advisor and confessor, which set certain boundaries. However, within that context, their relationship was loving and passionate and reading-between-the-lines, charged with sexual tension. ‘Booze-loosened lasses’ needs to be understood in the context of the drunken, tongue-in-cheek, sexual banter envisaged. Think hen party-meets-stag do at the races. ‘Lads laughing and lathered, lurching and leering’ at the ‘flirty, fresh faced fillies’ who ‘bar-barge’ Big Billy, ‘pouting promises for paid on porter’ — which may or may not be honoured. Maybe it’s a class thing; or maybe I’m a sly old soul myself. I think is easier for many people (not just men) to profess unconditional love to those utterly dependent and inarticulate (animals, babies) because those objects can’t muddy the emotional waters by articulating a reciprocal love (or rejection, even) — which is by definition a demand, a contract, a constraint. I suppose loving animals is in some respects an expression of solipsism or narcissism. Loving animals could also be an expression of alienation — maybe my working class narrators love their dogs because they come alive when working them in a way they simply can’t in their constrained quotidian — work, responsibility, debt, domesticity. The running dog is an emblem of freedom and escape — and a means of catharsis. Alternatively, perhaps I’m just sick of poems about ‘feelings’.

SHEENAGH: And while we're on the subject, do you have any theories as to why so many male poets are also birders? I can think of half a dozen male poets I know or know of, who are keen birdwatchers, and not a single female poet. If it weren't for that gender difference, one could formulate some high-flown (ha!) theory about flying being the ultimate escapism and poetry being another form of it, but it won't work for one sex only.

STEVE: It’s true — David Morley, Gregory Leadbetter, and Gerry Cambridge come to mind straight away. Pat explanation of why many men are birdwatchers and many male birdwatchers are poets: the alleged male hunting instinct sublimated to ‘capturing’ and ‘possession’ via the technical skills of identification, knowledge of habitat, etc fieldcraft, identification and classification. Birding poets effect a secondary sublimation: as opposed to being twitched, listed or sketched in the Alwych, the birds are written about, or otherwise incorporated in poems. I don’t list (except on my annual spring trip to Uist), but I frequently boast that 46 species of bird are named in Oswald’s Book of Hours. It’s the Hughes thing from Poetry in the Making — writing a poem is like ‘capturing animals’. Having said all that, I cheerfully concede that it might well be trite rubbish. Bird-watching and writing poetry is what you do when you escape for the world, even to engage with it. They’re both expressions of alienation and exile, a prophetic separation; Elijah in the wilderness being fed by ravens, in refuge from persecution, earthquake and fire, finding his still, small voice.

SHEENAGH: What do you plan to do next? There was a playlet in Englaland, plus a sort of mini-epic in alliterative verse; are you drawn to do more in those genres?

STEVE: I’ve just about finished two books of poetry. Bloody, proud and murderous men, adulterers and enemies of God explores the human capacity for extremism and violence. The aforementioned ‘Werewolf’ and The Ballad of Scouse McLaughlin’ have found homes in this book, along with my narrative sonnet-sequence ‘True Crime’ and my Poetry Society commission ‘How Dear is Life’. I've mentioned Incendium Amoris is a collection of poems arising from the life, writings and landscapes of the fourteenth century mystic Richard Rolle, my Corpus Christi play, The Coronation of the Virgin explores issues of rationality/irrationality and is a subtle and insightful contribution to the otherwise crass sloganeering of the ‘Religion vs Science’ debate. I’ve started work on a collection (see above) ‘about football’, provisionally entitled Enganche. I’ve got ideas for tracts, pamphlets and plays set in the revolutionary tumults of the seventeenth and fourteenth centuries and I have two abandoned novels I’d like to revive.

SHEENAGH: I utterly love the idea of tracts and pamphlets! If I could have lived in a former age (not that I would want to, and nor would George Mackay Brown if he'd had to cook on an open fire instead of grumbling about the decadence of stoves) I would choose the Commonwealth times when there was such an explosion of printed material, when the Welsh tailor Arise Evans could become a noted author of religious books and women could preach. What era do you think would have suited you best, and what would have been your fate in it?

STEVE: I love the ferment of the English revolution and its literary expression — Winstanley, Coppe, Tyranipocrit Uncovered, Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, the Levellers, Ranters and Diggers, although my favourite poem of that period is the fierce music of the fifty-nine signatures listed on Charles Stewart’s death warrant. Me and Alice Oswald. It’s a pity literacy in our language wasn’t sufficiently developed in 1381 to leave more evidence about the Peasant’s Revolt, although, ‘whan Adam delved and Eve spanne, who then was the gentilman?’, is fine poetry and as clear a piece of class analysis as you could wish for. Some of John Ball’s communications have survived, including the following, which I incorporated in my poem ‘John Ball’, (from Oswald’s Book of Hours):

Johan the Mullere hath ygrounde smal, smal, smal.
The Kynges sone of hevene schal pay for al.
Be war or ye be wo; Knoweth your freend
fro your foo. Haveth ynow, and seith ‘Hoo!’

There were no Lords in Eden’s commune. But if I had to choose a period to transport myself to it would have been the period immediately post 1066. I’d have joined what the historian Peter Rex has called ‘The English Resistance’ against Guillaume the Bastard’s genocidal asset-stripping of England and the North in particular. I would have chopped a few Frenchmen before being disembowelled and hung from a gibbet by my thumbs. Stoves aren’t decadent. They’re necessary. Stove PLC is the problem. It denies stoves at all to those who can’t pay and puts the Amazon through a wood chipper to build super-deluxe diamond-encrusted platinum stoves for Bill Gates and Roman Abramovich.

More poems and links

Objective One

Through the mists of an April dawn
a crowd flowed along Manvers Way, so many,
I had not thought the dole had undone so many,
sending them herded from the fuming valleys
of Dearne and Dove and Don and Rother,
into the bus bays and car parks of Ventura,
ASOS and Next PC, where they pour
from Nissans, Vauxhalls and private hire minicabs,
lighting cigarettes, adjusting iPhones,
pressing mobiles to their ears, striding out
in polished patent, pinstripes breaking
on the buckled instep, tailored skirts
and long coats flaring on the breeze.

Sixty thousand work here, in logistics,
call-centres, light industry and retail,
along the roundabouted blacktop
from Birdwell to Barnsdale, the EU funded
M1 to A1 link road. Objective One,
bringing light to parochial darkness,
access, investment, enterprise, jobs;
until sterling collapses, Kolkata undercuts
and the market-zeitgeist lurches,
retrenching capital in gold and gilts
and the provincia flips once more
to wrecking-ball brownfield-bombsite,
the full monty of dole and dereliction,
where brassed-off, hand-to-mouth yokels
are abandoned to dearth and absurdity,
their eh-ba-gum tutu dreams.

Once there were woods and open fields,
fens in the flatland, villages on the hill.
Bullheads in the millstream, polecats
in the warren; red kite, raven, white-tailed eagle,
over the wolf-prowled heath. Danelaw sokeland,
assarted from wildwood, torp in the langthwaite clays;
the Anglecynn muster at Ringstone Hill,
where three wapentakes meet; Oswald's grange
by the holy well – belltower, gatehouse,
carucates for geld. Here, beyond Whitwell
and the five boroughs, beyond Mercia's
clement mid-lands, we will beat the bounds
at rogationtide from Bamburgh, Danum,
Durham and York; the dragon-prowed river,
the waycross on the roman road, hoar apple tree,
whit's gospel thorn, the tumulus at Askern Hill;
these are the roots that clutch, these the sprouting corpses,
these are the fragments I shore against my ruins.

(From Englaland)

John Ball

Wycliffe's words and Langland's gave the Englisc
back their tongue. Manor french and church latin
cut-off in the throat, battening behind
the buttresses of keeps and cathedrals,
parsing and declining. Johon Schepe
proclaims his hedgerow gospel, singing
from the furze like a yellowhammer:
Johan the Mullere hath ygrounde smal, smal, smal.
The Kynges sone of hevene schal pay for al.
Be war or ye be wo; Knoweth your freend
fro your foo. Haveth ynow, and seith ‘Hoo!’
There were no lords in Eden's commune
Scythes sharpened on whetstones, gente non sancta.
War will follow the Word.

(From Oswald's Book of Hours)

The Song of the Yellowhammer from Englaland can be found here.

Smokestack Books, Steve Ely's publisher

Steve Ely's website

" Some of his verses provoked resentment in Conservative circles" (Wikipedia on Francis Lauderdale Adams): well, you couldn't wish for a better epitaph than that, really. Adams (1862-93), brought up in England but emigrated to Australia, was one of those turn-of-the-century Christian Socialists for whom religion and politics more or less merged. There is, inevitably, quite a lot of fin-de-siècle high-flown over-poetic style about some of his work, but then every so often he comes up with a brief gem like "To the Christians", insisting on Christ as son of a carpenter rather than of a god:

TAKE, then, your paltry Christ,
Your gentleman God.
We want the carpenter's son,
With his saw and hod.
We want the man who loved
The poor and oppressed,
Who hated the Rich man and King
And the Scribe and the Priest.
We want the Galilean
Who knew cross and rod.
It's your 'good taste' prefers
A bastard 'God!'

or "Hagar", in which the trials of Abraham's handmaid are updated but the hoped-for divine intervention never materializes:

SHE went along the road,
Her baby in her arms,
The night and its alarms
Made deadlier her load.

Her shrunken breasts were dry;
She felt the hunger bite.
She lay down in the night,
She and the child, to die.

But it would wail, and wail,
And wail. She crept away.
She had no word to say,
Yet still she heard it wail.

She took a jagged stone;
She wished it to be dead.
She beat it on the head;
It only gave one moan.

She has no word to say;
She sits there in the night.
The east sky glints with light,
And it is Christmas Day!

Poor chap shot himself aged 30, during a TB-caused haemorrhage which would probably have killed him anyway. I have a soft spot for him, as you can probably tell.

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Sheenagh Pugh

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Review of My Beautiful Sisters by Khalida Popal, pub. John Murray 2024
Review of The End of Enlightenment, by Richard Whatmore, pub. Penguin 2023
Review of The Stasi Poetry Circle by Philip Oltermann, pub. Faber 2022
Review of Almarks: Radical Poetry From Shetland
Review of Cargo of Limbs by Martyn Crucefix with photographs by Amel Alzakout, pub Hercules Editions
Seditious blogpost
Review of The Scramble for Europe by Stephen Smith, pub. Polity Press 2019
Review of Charles I's Killers In America, by Matthew Jenkinson, pub. OUP 2019
Review of We Will Be Free! The Bread & Roses Poetry Award Anthology 2018 Ed Mike Quille,
Review of Fuglicaavie by Jim Mainland, pub. the print floor 2018
Poems and "current issues"
Review of Bread for All: the Origins of the Welfare State by Chris Renwick, pub. Allen Lane 2017
The fear of difference
Review of "Les Parisiennes", by Anne Sebba, pub. Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2017
Review of Heligoland by Jan Rüger, pub OUP 2017
Ça Ira
Review of New Boots and Pantisocracies; eds W N Herbert and Andy Jackson, pub. Smokestack Books 2016
Review of Unbridled Spirits by Stevie Davies, pub. The Women's Press, 1998
Interview with Steve Ely
A political poet

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Good God! There's writing on both sides of that paper!

Sheenagh Pugh's writing blog

Entries tagged with politics

Review of My Beautiful Sisters by Khalida Popal, pub. John Murray 2024

Review of The End of Enlightenment, by Richard Whatmore, pub. Penguin 2023

Review of The Stasi Poetry Circle by Philip Oltermann, pub. Faber 2022

Review of Almarks: Radical Poetry From Shetland

Review of Cargo of Limbs by Martyn Crucefix with photographs by Amel Alzakout, pub Hercules Editions

Seditious blogpost

Review of The Scramble for Europe by Stephen Smith, pub. Polity Press 2019

Review of Charles I's Killers In America, by Matthew Jenkinson, pub. OUP 2019

Review of We Will Be Free! The Bread & Roses Poetry Award Anthology 2018 Ed Mike Quille,

Review of Fuglicaavie by Jim Mainland, pub. the print floor 2018

Poems and "current issues"

Review of Bread for All: the Origins of the Welfare State by Chris Renwick, pub. Allen Lane 2017

The fear of difference

Review of "Les Parisiennes", by Anne Sebba, pub. Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2017

Review of Heligoland by Jan Rüger, pub OUP 2017

Ça Ira

Review of New Boots and Pantisocracies; eds W N Herbert and Andy Jackson, pub. Smokestack Books 2016

Review of Unbridled Spirits by Stevie Davies, pub. The Women's Press, 1998

Interview with Steve Ely

A political poet