Jeff Cloves
I have written here before about The Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds because, in darkest times, it gives me inspiration and hope. Life is pretty dark at the moment but it’s as well to remember that growth doesn’t stop because it’s winter time and the renewal of spring doesn’t come from nowhere:
Walls will come down
the prisons are burning
under cold ground
warm worms are turning
The unexpected destruction of the Berlin…
Lately I have been thinking – once again – about desertion from the military. This time, I’ve been prompted by reading a review (not the book) of Deserter: The Last Untold Story of the Second World War by Charles Glass (HarperPress, 2013, £25). The review reveals that ‘as many as 100,000 British and 50,000 US Servicemen are believed to have deserted at some point’. I hope to return to this book about ‘the final taboo’ in a future PN.
But taboo? Well, that’s as maybe but…
How powerfully songs can hit you in the heart and make the impact that politicians struggle to achieve with their leaden delivery and faux sincerity. Thus Margaret Thatcher and her protégé young master Blair spring to mind.
Songs, however, can almost leap from the radio such are their intensity.
Elvis Costello achieved this with ‘Oliver’s army’ – the best song to have emerged from Ireland’s modern troubles – and his heartbreaking response to the Falklands…
How the media loves anniversaries and now I’m at it too; it hardly seems 10 months ago let alone 10 years that war was declared on Iraq. Saddam was the excuse, war was the result, and the number of Iraqis who’ve died in consequence will be forever disputed. What PN readers may agree upon is that one death was one too many.
What the peace group here in Stroud was, and is, agreed upon was that, from the…
Utopia is the second of Five Leaves’ annual journals and features contributions from 23 writers, essayists, songwriters, poets – some living, some dead – loosely based on the subject of utopia; although Utopias (plural) might read more accurately.
Books about Utopia(s) are always necessary, but with our supine parliament and the monumental lack of inspiration and aspiration exhibited by its constituent MPs, how absolutely necessary this one is now. Mike Marqusee’s opening essay is…
In 1963, what was then London Transport transported me to The Theatre Royal Stratford East and there I saw its legendary production of Oh What a Lovely War! It is an evening I will never forget; not least because I sat behind an elderly man who began to weep as the mounting casualty figures of the First World War flashed up on the illuminated screen suspended over the set.
This simple but heartrending device continued to the end of the evening and so did his weeping. His tears…
In 1970, I met, at peace activist Dennis Gould's home in Cornwall, an unassuming musician and writer of, it seemed to me, indisputable talent and originality. He'd just had his first LP Bill Fay released and I was so impressed, I wrote a piece about him in the rock magazine Zigzag.
This launched a valued friendship with Bill which was marked last month, by the release of his third commissioned studio album, Life is People, to a set of rave reviews unequalled in my…
There are not so many anarchist pacifist poets in print that we can afford to overlook any one of them. In John Rety’s case he was – what ever else – a hard man to overlook or ignore. He was by nature a (nonviolent) combatant and faced with an empty room he’d have had an argument with himself. A cliché, I know but its truth suited him to the ground. So, this posthumous collection of new and selected poems is a welcome arrival and worthy of attention.
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My headline’s a distortion; a Peace News Summer camp is nothing like Maplin’s television idyll; Maplin’s was entirely devoted to having a good time and didn’t fret about moral purpose.
Hang-on though, I’ve just come back from this summer’s PN tented rave-up and a good time is exactly what I had. Of course, there was a fair bit of fretting – and purposeful and well-aimed it was – but we all deserve a good time from time to time and it’s arguable whether shared angst is better…
Recently I was at a film show of pro-cycling films promoted by the excellent and innovative campaigning collective Bicycology.
The films were of variable quality and content and mostly strident in their opposition to car ownership and use.
Now whether such stridency is counter-productive is another debate but, as I’ve often mentioned in this column, PN’s embrace and promotion of cycling as a peaceful and healthy means of transport runs through its make-up like the…
Sometimes I try – like many PN readers I guess – to imagine myself in the position of a bereaved family in a civil war and know that revenge would be uppermost in my mind.
The intention to make somebody pay and suffer the same terrible loss and pain as yourself is near-irresistible and, maybe, even human nature.
Throughout my life, state gangsterism and political perfidy have sent me…
Small events in small towns happen everywhere in UK plc but they’re worth recounting nonetheless. At times it’s easy to believe that nobody cares about anything and nothing can be done anyway. Usually the arrival of PN is a corrective to such negative thinking on my part but occasionally there also occur what Tory prime minister Harold (Supermac) Macmillan once described as “events, dear boy, events”, and the world takes on a slightly rosier hue.
Events here in the People’s Republic…
The well-titled A Thorn in the Flesh is the latest book from the indefatigably wondrous poetry publisher Hearing Eye. It contains 37 (mostly short) poems from the equally wondrous Eddie Linden.
I've heard of Eddie, know of his place in, and impact on, the poetry scene but, prior to this book, had encountered only one poem - and that in an Hearing Eye anthology. Now Iíve made his literary (not physical) acquaintance, I understand the impact he made when he arrived from Scotland in the…
For the whole of my life so far, civil war has raged somewhere in the world and there seems no end in sight. In Spain, 75 years ago, the army led by general Franco staged a military coup against the legally-elected Republican government and the resulting civil war lasted for nearly three years. Franco’s army – boosted by the support of Hitler and Mussolini – eventually triumphed, and his dictatorship survived from 1939 until 1975. The political,social and cultural fall-out from this bitter…
It may surprise you to learn, dear readers, that I try to avoid writing too often about books here. Trouble is, kind people keep sending me them because they think they’ll interest me. Invariably they do. Take, for example, the collection of poems by John Lucas published in 2010 by the estimable Five Leaves Publications whose books often get a mention here.
Things to Say (£7.99) is a wide-ranging substantial body of work by an established poet of reputation and clout and is divided…
