Simon Taylor

Poetry magazine suggested, “John Ash could be the best English poet of his generation,” which prompted John to remark wryly, “Why ‘could’?” [- from here] I know I mix the present with the past, but that’s how I like it: there is no other way to go on. - John Ash

title is from the final page of Clayton Crockett’s Energy and Change: A New Materialist Cosmotheology, published by Columbia University Press, 2022. I don’t really intend a review. I wrote to the author to say I enjoyed his book, that I was led to read it by my

Bastarda takes us on another musical journey, this time delving into Hasidic Nigunim. These mystical Jewish songs, almost always sung without lyrics, originated in the Hasidic revival movement of the 18th century and often drew from local music patterns and traditions. Ecstatic dancing and singing of nigunim was a way

… Asturias, where things were steaming following the drastic abolition of currency and private property and the creation of a proletarian army. — Leonardo Padura, The Man Who Loved Dogs, translated by Anna Kushner, p.80 With arguments that were perhaps more passionate than rational, Lev Davidovich [Trotsky] tried to convince the

In its embrace of modern art we see the positivity of a society, its embrace of progress, towards radical transformation, towards freeing all that is good, vital and creative. This is the soil in which it grows and the opposite of any notion of financial growth, of economic vitality, of

For too long we have maintained a silence closely resembling stupidity — Neil Roberts November 18, 1982, at 12.35 am, Neal Ian Roberts detonated six sticks of gelignite in his backpack and in sight of the two security guards blew himself up in the foyer of the Wanganui Computer Centre.