Danger: Left-wing sensibility at work

Our friends over at the internet magazine The Recusant have published an interesting and long review of The Night Shift. A small sample is extracted below. You can find the full review on http://www.therecusant.org.uk/#/night-shift-review/4541311913. It is awkward to print out, what you do is copy it by covering the text and sliding down till it ends on the screen on the website, then simply pasting it into Word afterwards. But it is a bit fiddly. If reading on screen simply keep scrolling down.

"With so many contemporary poetry anthologies attempting to define a zeitgeist aesthetic of today via a relative handful of ‘academy’ graduates, it is heartening to read an anthology which takes a more diverse sweep of voices and styles to emphasize the timelessness of certain poetic themes. The Night Shift is an ambitious anthology – beautifully produced by Nottingham-based press Five Leaves in A5 hardback – themed around ‘night’, and comprised of three sections: ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ (night shift work), ‘In The Forests of the Night’ (nocturnal animal kingdom), and ‘The Crumpled Duvet’ (insomnia). This is not therefore an anthology with a literary agenda; politically, there is a certain welcome left-wing sensibility at work, particularly in the in the first section, but this is par for the course with radical presses such as Five Leaves; this is essentially an anthology in the original sense of the word, a collecting together of poems across the literary canon, past and present, all linked by theme of ‘night’. There is a thoughtful Foreword by Welsh broadcaster John Humphrys, and three introductions by the editors to their respective sections."