Not owning a wheelbarrow I never buy a newspaper at the weekend. I've been missing out. For the last two years the Independent on Sunday has been running a sort of soup-kitchen for malnourished poems. This admirable project is overseen by the benign, nurturing and twinkly-eyed critic Ruth Padel, who if she isn't a Lib Dem peeress already certainly deserves to be. Her approach is defiantly political. As she sees it, the task of poetry is to restore the voices of the lost, the oppressed, the despairing and the downtrodden.
Many of the 'poems' in this anthology are just fragments of stimulating, well-observed prose aligned to the left-hand side of the page. Atrocity-pedlars are given plenty of space. In '1847' Maura Dooley turns the potato famine into a bloodthirsty piece of needle-point whose purpose is to generate shock and income from a historical tragedy. Our shock, her income. It's like watching a Jew selling Auschwitz lampshades to a Holocaust museum. David Dabydeen's 'El Dorado' - a rose-tinted lament for a dead slave - is a similar exercise in genocide trinketry.
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