The radical independent publisher Smokestack Books has published a retrospective anthology containing one poem from each of the 199 titles it has published since 2004.

Smokestack Lightning includes poems by Vladimir Mayakovsky, Bertolt Brecht, Heinrich Heine, Louis Aragon, John Berger, Victor Jara, Sylvia Pankhurst, Michael Rosen, Katrina Porteous, Keith Armstrong, David Cain, Linda France, Ian McMillan, Ian Duhig, Steve Ely, Martin Rowson, Kate Fox, Andy Jackson, SJ Litherland, Alan Morrison, Ian Parks, Chris Searle, Ruth Valentine, and Martin Espada, as well as poems from Smokestack’s anthologies of poetry from Palestine, Greece, France, Russia and Cuba.

The anthology includes poems from Algeria, Australia, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Chile, Cuba, El Salvador, France, Germany, Greece, Guyana, Hungary, Iraq, Italy, the Netherlands, Palestine, Poland, Russia and the Soviet Union, Spain, Syria, the US, and Venezuela. Smokestack publisher Andy Croft admits in his introduction that such a selection is “bulging and contradictory, pulling in different directions. These poems were never intended to be inside the same covers.”

He adds: “Smokestack Books was established in 2004 in protest at the dullness, narrowness and triviality of so much of the contemporary British poetry scene. Smokestack’s declared aim has always been to keep open a space for what is left of the radical poetic tradition in the twenty-first century.”

The opening poem, from Dunstanburgh by Katrina Porteous, points to Smokestack’s north-east roots. Kevin Cadwallender’s amusing ‘The Building Trade’ is about Julian the existentialist who works on a building site and dreams of “a mass uprising of bricks, / of boundaries collapsing all over suburbia.”  

‘Celebrate Wha?’ by Moqapi Selassie comes from a 2011 anthology, Ten Black British Poets from the Midlands, while Victor Jara’s ‘Chile Stadium’ reminds us of nightmares abroad: “What horror the face of fascism creates!”

A poem by Peter Raynard, ‘Scholarship Boys’, reflects my own experience of going to a fusty, dusty boys’ grammar school in the 1960s. It begins: “Unlucky enough to pass our eleven plus …”, while Alan Morrison’s verse essay Anxious Corporals includes a romantic paean to the educational power of Pelican paperbacks.

An extract from David Cain’s Truth Street, about the Hillsborough disaster, and which was shortlisted in 2019 for the Forward prize for best first collection, includes two stark sentences: “It’s hard to describe the sound. I’ve never heard the sound since.”

There are a number of acerbic contributions from award-winning cartoonist Martin Rowson, a Smokestack regular. But maybe some of the most arresting lines come in the simple passion of a plea by Palestinian-American poet Farid Bitar, who has lived in exile for 40 years: “I am asking for justice. / I am asking for dignity. / I am asking for my home back.”

Smokestack Lightning, edited by Andy Croft, Smokestack Books, £9.99