Poetry Corner: Eddie
BRIDGET GRIFFIN Tiles mosaic Stomach archaic Sprightly glistening territorial eyes A tongue that laps up. All the noise Very scaled. Many pigments of brown This artful dodger has a frown Dancing jiving. Back and to Like a Pokemon card. He…
Poetry Corner: Nature’s Philosophy
VICTOR TIMMONS Nocturnal birds in sibilant causerie Forest creatures in distant revelry While nature's blanket dims their rivalry And stills the air to peaceful reverie How brief is this tranquillity As hostile meetings in darkened shrubbery Remind, if only momentarily…
BOOKBUSTER REVIEW: One Fine Day
By Ian MarchantPublished by September Publishing, rrp £ BY TIM BARTON Ian Marchant, a regular presenter on ‘Open Country’, Radio 4, and diarist for Church Times, is dying. Side by side with his discovery of his soon-to-arrive demise, he delves…
BOOKBUSTER REVIEW: Follow the Money
By Paul JohnsonPublished by Abacus, rrp £ BY TIM BARTON The subtitle of this book is ‘how much does Britain cost?’, cost being defined here by the balance of taxes in and government spending out. As the author notes, public…
Poetry Corner: New Year Sea Poem
TOM GRINDROD hear it hear it before you see it against the rain shoulders hunched blowing out turn the corner and there it is a great roiling wall of liquid concrete pebbledashed spitting and furious sound and mass and violence…
The Stamp of Innocence
by Aled Gwyn JôbPublished by Troubadorrrp £ at Bookbusterreview by Tim Barton The 'Post Office scandal' has dominated the news for a few weeks now, yet it goes back a quarter of a century! That incredibly long-running series of injustices…
Poetry Corner: Haiku Sequence
JOHN R PARSONS riding networks of winter trees gibbous moon heads for the open after the tree surgeon I stack his sawn off limbs freak weather a bare cherry in full blossom one gold herringbone in clear blue evening sky…
BOOKBUSTER REVIEW – Disconsolate Dreamers: On Pessimism and Utopia
Published by Zer0 Books, rrp £ BY TIM BARTON ‘Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will’, said Romain Rolland, sadly remembered primarily for being a Stalinist. He used the phrase in a 1919 essay, which was read by the…
Poetry Corner
Mask 2020 BEN FAIRLIGHT Swimming in a mid-September sea I dipped my head under, daringly, Then shook my chill-mangled mop like a dog To wring out London and its modern smog Of covid. Twisting to a streaky pink-white sky I…
BOOKBUSTER REVIEW – Palestinians and Israelis: A Short History of Conflict
Published by The History Press,rrp £ BY TIM BARTON In Deuteronomy, Chapter 31, Moses claims ‘the Lord’ promised a swath of land west of Jordan to the Israelites, saying ‘the Lord shall do unto them as he did to Sihon…