'A soft, blunt, insistent rhythm in Alan Humm’s lines beats time to accounts of absent friends, of urban landscapes, of past and present violence, of love’s uncertainties.'

- David Harsent

'Alan Humm's poised and poignant debut collection illuminates, with laser accuracy, ‘the dark shape in your heart/that comes to claim you as its own'. Here is first love, paternal love, spiritual love, the love for friends and for shared music – the songs that can change you and yet still take you back to who you once were. Above all, Humm understands the cost of love: loss, grief, yearning, the love that doesn't satisfy and doesn't comfort. The love that, as he adapts Yeats in his own new version of Byzantium, 'makes a country for old men'.

His searingly honest verse is shot through with startling imagery ('a dog reads midges/like foreign type' in 'Summer, newly over') while every line is perfectly placed, every word made to count. As a result, his luminous poems map the course not just of the poet's but all of our emotional lives. As Humm notes: 'Well, we all lose it;/ the thing that glows'. In the meantime, A Brief and Biased History of Love pinpoints the lingering shimmer of shared experience with exceptional confidence and compassion.'

- Jo Balmer, author of Catullus: Poems of Love and Hate.

'There is a searching quality to Alan Humm’s poetry. Like an anchorite drinking in each and every detail to sustain them for their ascetic seclusion in the cell, he looks, has looked at things very closely. But his is a secular perspective, with the intention of describing with exactitude the elusive incident of the everyday: the quality of light in its countless varieties, how it transforms the colour of a leaf or the aspect of a building; the accidental loveliness a body can acquire in movement and leisure.

His writing deftly investigates the mutability of experience – elements and sensations shift, merge, exchange – so light is “like a cupped hand” and “water seems black and hard as anthracite”. When the poet turns his eye towards people, the results are both compassionate and unflinching, from a tender sequence mediating on the grace notes and quirks of old friends to several powerfully visceral poems about the emotional contusions incurred from living with an alcoholic father.

This is an impressive, thoughtful debut which ultimately seeks answers to a great many inscrutabilities – not least why as humans we return to love as instinctively as breathing. To accompany him as a reader in his search is surprising and rewarding.'

- Louise Peterkin, author of The Night Jar.

A Brief and Biased History of Love, by Alan Humm, ISBN 978-1-912710-55-3, is £9 plus £3 p. and p. Please order using the Donate button here, leaving your name and address at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., and we'll fulfil your order promptly.

The poems in Rebel Admin are visually intense, and syntactically jagged; they create a sort of fragmentary cinema, one that works to signal the irrational absurdity of neoliberal culture, but also to disrupt its plausibly smooth and continuously scrolling script.

Humour—of a uniquely warped and whacked-out variety—is the throughline of Rebel Admin, the constant current in its wild carnival of disorder. In ‘Man Reading Gibbon on The Midland Red’ a chance sighting of a passenger on a Midland Red bus reading The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by rationalist historian Edward Gibbon sparks a gleefully irrational poem of ranting whimsy in which rationalist aims and ideologies are satirised and upended.

Humour for Hutchins is a species of glitch; it mirrors his radical use of syntax and grammar, his strange portmanteau and hapax legomena, his judicious use of archaicism and slang to—in the manner of Walter Benjamin’s ‘dialectical image’—disrupt or shock, and to expose through this shock our relationship to the historical, political, and cultural forces that govern our contingent moment.

Against the numbing spectacle and sinister machinery of capitalism he erects a savvy lyric vision that is part Mark E. Smith, part William Blake.

Rebel Admin., by Al Hutchins, ISBN 978-1-912710-61-4, is £9 plus £3 p. and p. Please order using the Donate button here, leaving your name and address at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., and we'll fulfil your order promptly.

Shellshocked Lives

by Viktoria Simanovski

These days I see an unjust world fragmented into fractions, thrusting children into battles and wars that are not of their making. In my film I try to express my hope for justice and understanding between people and between nations. We all start our journey as humans, but somewhere along the way we get tangled up in the web of nationalities, religions etc. It pains me to witness the transformation of children, who may once have been playmates, into pawns that are drawn into wars they never wished for. I really want people to allow themselves to see the difference between their own feelings and what is imposed from the outside.

Viktoria Simanovski is a member of a group called Just Building Bridges. It includes sanctuary seekers, refugees and asylum seekers in north-east England that has produced a series of photographs and short films on the theme of justice. The group itself is very diverse, from several different countries and continents. All of them are trying to ‘build bridges’ from a relatively marginalised position, and resettle peacefully and successfully in various local communities.

The photographs, films and zines made by the group cover a wide range of themes. There are local issues of waste, litter, and noise; bigger economic issues such as the fast fashion industry; and some very topical issues of global significance, such as the conflicts in the Ukraine and the Middle East.

The project was facilitated by Theresa Easton, lecturer in Fine Art at Newcastle University; Carl Joyce, photographer and filmmaker; and Michael Quille, writer and editor of Culture Matters. Thanks are due to Newcastle University and the Hatton Gallery Learning Space for the use of premises and equipment, and the Passionist Community for their financial support.

The exhibition materials are a fine body of authentic, heartfelt work. There are around 28 A4 photographs in A3 frames; 2 short films for playing on a loop; and a series of accompanying zines. If you are interested in displaying the exhibition, please contact This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Yer Ower Voices! is an anthology of dialect poetry in Welsh and English. The book is divided by geographical regional dialects: Swansea, The Valleys, Cardiff/ Newport, and North & West Wales. It is  the first anthology of its kind ever published. 

 The poets in Yer Ower Voices! show how dialect poetry may at one level be parochial but at its best how it can be universally relevant as well. Dialect poetry is also particularly capable of forcefully giving voice to whole communities in Wales who may have been represented in fiction and films to some extent, but have been largely invisible in the landscape of poetry.

This highly original anthology is unique in its presentation of the variety of dialect poetry written in Wales today. Unique, too, in the space it gives to poems written in dialects of Welsh. Yer Ower Voices! shows clearly how dialect writing can be relevant both locally and universally. Dialect poetry is particularly capable of forcefully expressing the experiences of social groups such as the working class, who have been traditionally under-represented as readers and writers of poetry. We hope that the book acts as a stimulus and increases both the reading and the writing of poetry in Wales.

Yer Ower Voices! Dialect poems in Welsh and English from Cymru, edited by Mike Jenkins, 148pps., £12, is available here.

The five winners of this year's Award are: Michael Lowkain, Jenny Mitchell, Ian Parks, Ross Walsh and Rob Walton. £100 will wing its wandering way to their worthy workers' wallets, and we'll produce the printed anthology by the end of November.

That will include the winning poems plus poems by Abigail Ottley, Cara L McKee, Steven Taylor, Peter Raynard, Lois Hambleton, Gwyneth Wilson, John F Keane, Mary Black, Ruth Aylett, Declan Geraghty, Julie Easley, Alan Weadick, Sarah Leavesley,  Angela Topping, Laura Taylor, Bavid Bleiman, John Morris, Owen Gallagher, Paul Francis, John Freeman, Laura Strickland, Joe Williams, Martin Hayes, Alan Morrison, Peadar O'Donoghue, and Moira Garland.

We'll send copies to everyone included in the anthology, and it'll be on sale in our Books section. Thanks to all who entered this year, for the sixth (and probably last) Bread and Roses Poetry Award.

Holberrys is a play about two Sheffield Chartists, Samuel and Mary Holberry, who helped organise the betrayed ‘physical force’ insurrection in the city in January 1840.

Samuel, a distillery worker, former agricultural worker and ex-soldier who had served in Ireland in the suppression of the Ribbonmen rebellion in 1833, and his wife Mary, were at the centre of militant campaigning and planning the rebellion. Their plans were divulged, with Samuel sentenced to four years imprisonment in prisons in Northallerton and York, where he died of consumption in 1842 at the age of 27. A hero of his time to working people, over 50,000 people attended his funeral procession in Sheffield.

The Holberrys’ story is illustrated using moving photographs taken by Ron McCormick during a schoolchildren’s re-enactment of the Chartist rising in Newport, South Wales in November 1839.

Holberrys dramatises the lives of Samuel and Mary and their years in Sheffield, ever a city of resistance and struggle. Its author, Chris Searle, is a teacher and it is a play for both the stage and the classroom, telling of an important episode in British history which is rarely remembered. It is free to download as a pdf, below.

England and Son is a one-man play written specifically for the political comedian Mark Thomas by award-winning playwright Ed Edwards (The Political History of Smack and Crack). It's a heartbreaking but funny horror story in which all the horrors are real.

Prepare for Mark to take you on a epic odyssey where disaster capitalism, Thatcherite politics and the end of Empire merge in the simple tale of a working-class boy who just wants his dad to smile at him and ruffle his hair.

This is the first play Mark has ever performed in that he has not written himself, and the play was in the top nine shows in the Sunday Times “must-see” list for this year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

England and Son is on at Paine’s Plough Roundabout, Edinburgh 4^th – 28^th August.

There will be a sixty date tour after Endinburgh. To find a date near you visit Mark’s website here.

The mission of Culture Matters is to promote cultural democracy. This means providing articles and works of art for people whose views and voices go largely ignored by the ruling classes of late capitalist Britain. We aim to be a platform where the oppressed and exploited can develop and express their own intellectual and artistic output.

In the summer of 2023 no minority was more brusquely and effectively suppressed than republicans. Our new anthology, Dungheap Cockerel, has been created in a few weeks to counter that injustice with satires on monarchy in general and its latest incumbent in particular. It is available as a free downloadable pdf in the Poetry section, and we have also printed a few books, which are available at £9 each plus £2 p. and p. using the button below.

The mission of Culture Matters is to promote cultural democracy. This means providing articles and works of art for people whose views and voices go largely ignored by the ruling classes of late capitalist Britain. We aim to be a platform where the oppressed and exploited can develop and express their own intellectual and artistic output.

In the summer of 2023 no minority was more brusquely and effectively suppressed than republicans. Our new anthology, Dungheap Cockerel, has been created in a few weeks to counter that injustice with satires on monarchy in general and its latest incumbent in particular. 

—Fred Voss

Machine / Language by Martin Hayes with illustrations by Martin Rowson, ISBN 978-1-912710-59-1, £7 plus £3 p.and p.