Kirjahaku

Joe Orton was ruined and knew it, but he wasn't a hypocrite. He was ruined by his culture. He was poor, ill-educated, raised in a family whose dominating personality was a tyrant. He was deprived of love and figures he could identify with. His society was to blame for his poverty. It was widespread when he was born on 1st January 1933. At the time, most wage-earners didn't pay income tax. There was no health service, education was hit and miss. Deprivation was accepted by many of those in power as a fact of life. Orton was born into an exploitative, manipulative, abusive, hypocritical culture. He came to realize it and employed his genius in scathing mockery of the society which did him so much harm. Orton's plays show what happens when people won't face the truth about themselves. The carnage in Noel Road on 9th August 1967 might have been the final scene from one of his works. Orton had lived close to violence and abuse all his life. He knew a violent death was always possible.

Alan Dent was born in Preston in 1951. He has published five volumes of poetry, four collections of translations from French, a book of reviews of contemporary poetry, five collections of short stories and nine novels under a pen name (all to be re-issued under his own name) and is the founder and editor of The Penniless Press and its successor, MQB.

Alan Dent was born in Preston in 1951. He has published five volumes of poetry, four collections of translations from French, a book of reviews of contemporary poetry, five collections of short stories and nine novels under a pen name (all to be re-issued under his own name) and is the founder and editor of The Penniless Press and its successor, MQB.

An anthology of contemporary French counter-cultural poetry.

This is a witty, funny, barbed piece of iconoclasm about emotional double dealing and hypocrisy, of superficial materialism and skewed values and the tragicomic ending of a long established relationship. It's a sharp, trenchant parody set in a milieu of the inescapable expectational norm of profit.

For the past twenty years Alan Dent's caustic, witty, polemical, enthusiastic and highly individual reviews of modern poetry have been the most eagerly read section of his magazines The Penniless Press and Mistress Quickly's Bed. Few critics can boast of having a poem written about their activity (Dentistry by Edward MacKinnon), but it isn't surprising Dent has: he may divide opinion, but he is always memorable and never afraid of making enemies ( at least the right ones). This volume contains all his poetry reviews since 1995 together with a few longer pieces. Follow the thread of their argument and you will find an original and bracing view of modern poetry in Britain. The title is drawn from a quotation by Miroslav Holub used as the book's epigraph. Taking his cue from the great Czech, Dent hunts down the excessive subjectivity of modern poets and spikes it. In doing so he works out a different possibility for poetry. No one interested in modern poetic practice should miss this book.

In its readiness to listen in on the speech of a wide variety of ordinary, working people, and to give us insights into the texture of their daily lives, Dent's writing is not merely unfashionable, it is like very little that is currently being written (or anyway published.) It does however remind me of that fine, scandalously neglected American writer, Nelson Algren. Like Algren, Dent's socialism, while never reductive, is integral to his vision of what life is and what it could be. And like Algren, he makes satisfying stories out of what happens to happen to the kind of people whose existence, when it's noticed at all, is for the most part caricatured or sentimentalized. In other words, Dent testifies to the value of Camus's claim that art is nobody's enemy, because it opens the prisons and gives voice to the sorrows and joys of all. John Lucas

2019 and Bill George, sixty-eight, life-long lover of literature and part-time anarchistic socialist, turns up to his Labour Party Branch meeting to be told he's suspended. Caught up in the frenzy of false accusations unleashed after Corbyn's second leadership victory, George is debris in the "bringing the Party into disrepute" sweep: he sent an e-mail pointing out the long history of Zionist anti-Semitism. His lengthy response to the Party's questions, delivered within the requisite seven days, brings no response, no investigation, merely silence. He has become a non-person: CN-2539. After eighteen months he makes a hopeless Subject Access Request which disappears down the memory hole. Meanwhile, his low-key, retired life rolls along. He visits an old pal in London whose marriage and wife are crumbling; rubs along nicely with his Muslim neighbours, even if their son's insistence on a trip to the park to sail his yacht on the duck pond ends in sodden farce; meets up with an old radical friend who is diagnosed with prostate cancer. Forced to put his life in review he comes to question what he has taken for granted. In this tragi-comic, bitter-witty little novel, Dent explores not only the nature of our political system, its self-serving elites and compliant media but a world order founded on conquest, based on racism in pursuit of lucre.

Two plays about financial goings on in the oil industry. The world is run by the rich. Their influence over government policy in the so-called democracies is far greater than the voters'. Elsewhere, there isn't even a pretence that aren't in control. They defy the law and are praised for it. They are embraced by politicians who claim to represent the people. Yet where are they in literature? In drama, the kitchen sink movement kicked off the trend of focusing on the lives of the poor, the working-class, the common folk. Once excluded from drawing-room drama, it was assumed that bringing their experience to the stage would alert social conscience. Decades of this doesn't seem to have slowed the slither rightwards. Meanwhile, in literature, the rich are more or less invisible. Their way of thinking is unexplored. By and large, the people who rule the world are absent from the stage.

To this day-by-day account of the events in Gaza since 7th October 2023 the author adds the comments of journalists, activists, academics, writers, politicians and his own observations and conclusions, making it a reference and critique. Running through it is an attack on the supremacism which underpins the occupation and the violence necessary to sustain it. Ever-present is the US whose concepts of Manifest Destiny and the Monroe Doctrine, derived from its foundation as a settler-colonial society, make it the power behind Israel, the "cop on the beat". Written as the appalling tragedy unfolded, the book has the immediacy of lived events. Covering only a little more than the first two months, it is the first in a series which will follow the so-called war to whatever conclusion it may arrive at.