Alan Morrison – författare

Taking its title from the brown envelopes that strike fear into benefit-claimants and the biblical ‘Rapture’, Alan Morrison’s eighth collection imagines these letters as passports to a twisted Tory notion of salvation through benefit sanction. Tan Raptures is a series of verse-missives from the frontline of the war against the poor and its spirit-stripping weapons of food banks, poor doors and homeless spikes. It’s a people’s history, from Dale Farm and the firebombing of the Freedom Bookshop to Troika-shackled Athens, featuring the Bryant & May Matchgirls, the International Brigades, the Runnymede Diggers, Los Indignados, Gerrard Winstanley, Joe Hill, Wal Hannington, Conrad Noël and Christopher Caudwell. The title poem is a Catholic Socialist polemic in opposition to self-proclaimed ‘Roman Catholic’ Iain Duncan Smith’s despotic six year grip at the DWP.

At the beginning of the Fifth Gaza War, the Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer defiantly promised that if the Israeli Defence Force attacked his house he would ‘throw my pen in the faces of the soldiers’. A few weeks later, Alareer was killed by an Israeli airstrike on the building.

Since the outbreak of the ‘Israel-Hamas war’ in October 2023, over 20k Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, almost all of them civilians. Four thousand children were killed in the first few weeks of the war. A third of all the houses have been destroyed, together with the water and electricity infrastructure, 300 schools, 26 hospitals and 88 mosques, turning Gaza into what UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has called a ‘graveyard’.

Out of Gaza brings together responses to the current crisis by Palestinian poets, including Naomi Shihab Nye, Farid Bitar, Deema Shehabi, Hala Alyan, Ali Abukhattab, Marwan Makhoul, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, Mohammed Mousa, Dareen Tatour and Sara Saleh. These are poems of rubble and resilience, death and resistance; they speak about displacement, occupation, exile and bombardment. Angry with the world’s silence in the face of such tragedy, these poems bear witness to catastrophe and to the powerful determination to survive it.

A percentage of the sales of this book go to the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

Anxious Corporals is a celebration of the lost world of the self-educating working-class, from Mr Kipps, Leonard Bast and the Age of Hooper to Workington Man. Taking its title from Arthur Koestler's idea of the culture-thirsty conscript, Morrison recalls the men and women who once sought 'self-improvement' through correspondence courses, adult education, political parties and Pelican paperbacks. It’s an essay in verse about education and class, deference and independence, Reason and Reaction, the victory of shopkeeper values and the defeat of the post-war consensus.