Slave Songs and Symphonies Poems by David Betteridge Drawings by Bob Starrett Edited and introduced by Mike Quille Never can I pursue in quiet that which holds my soul in thrall, never rest at peace contented, and I storm without cease... - Karl Marx
2016
First published 2016 by Culture Matters, an imprint of Manifesto Press. Culture Matters aims to promote progressive arts and culture, as part of the cultural struggle for socialism. See www.culturematters.org.uk Versions of some of the poems in this booklet have been previously published in Granny Albyn’s Complaint and A Rose Loupt Oot (Smokestack Books). Some of the drawings have been previously published in Rattling the Cage (Ferret Press) and The Way I See It (Fair Pley). Copyright Š David Betteridge and Bob Starrett All rights reserved Cover image by Bob Starrett Print by Evoprint and Design Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-907464-16-4
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Introduction I shall not cease from mental fight Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand Till we have built Jerusalem In England's green and pleasant land. - William Blake Culture Matters is a new website about the arts and culture generally, at www.culturematters.org.uk. It's dedicated to the cultural struggle, the 'mental fight' as Blake puts it, to build a progressive, democratic and socialist culture not only in England, and not only in Britain, but in the world. To that end, we've published hundreds of essays, articles, reviews, poems, images and other material, in less than a year. David Betteridge and Bob Starrett are two of our contributors, and this booklet has been developed from their poems and drawings. As you will see as you turn the pages, it is an ambitious, wideranging and beautifully unified collection of poems, drawings, collages, epigraphs and notes. It's about human history, progressive art and music, campaigns for political freedom, social justice and peace. Above all it's about the class and cultural struggle of workers 'by hand and by brain' as David says, to regain control and ownership of the fruits of their labour. David's poems are leftist, lyrical, and learned. They are infused with sadness and compassion for the sufferings of our class, the working class. But they are also inspired by visionary hope, and a strong belief that our currently class-divided society and culture can be transformed by radical politics and good art – and by radical art and good politics. His themes develop and recur, growing in strength and confidence as the collection progresses, culminating in a brilliant fusion of factual description and prophetic utterance: we dig your graves. 7
Bob's drawings are much, much more than illustrations. They dance with the poems, commenting on them as well as illustrating them, extending, enhancing and even challenging the poems' verbal meanings with powerful visual expressions of their themes and contexts. They are independent ideograms, emblems, portrayals, carrying both abstract and representational meanings. Sometimes they seem Goya-esque in their dark, inkblack truthfulness, their intimate knowledge of suffering and 'mental fight'. But then, just like David’s poems, they resolve the struggles they depict. William Blake’s poems and images worked together in the same way, to both express and resolve the struggles he depicted. This booklet is thus not only about class and cultural struggle, it is class and cultural struggle. It not only tells the story of how slave songs become symphonies - it helps make it happen. Mike Quille Editor Culture Matters Autumn 2016
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Contents So Long ....................................................................................10 In Brecht’s Bar ........................................................................14 Fighting Back............................................................................16 Giving Back Riches ................................................................18 Showing a Way ........................................................................20 A Fish Rising ............................................................................26 Pulling the Plug ........................................................................30 Yes ............................................................................................32 The Tug of It ............................................................................34 Essential Gifts ..........................................................................36 Only in a Commonweal ............................................................38 Notes ........................................................................................40
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So Long I am a partisan, I am alive, I feel the pulse of the activity of the future city that those on my side are building... - Antonio Gramsci I was born, God knows when, in the lee of a red rock, shaded by a baobab tree. Singing, hunting, gathering, I made my given niche of scrubland home. Aeons on, seeing ends no longer meet, I ventured on a journey out. The world’s rivers, coasts, and straits were my thoroughfares; I settled anywhere and everywhere, including here, where now I stand with you and speak. Extremes of ice, tornado, torrent, blaze, and quake I weathered, and was weathered by. Hunger pangs and predators were frequently my lot. Paradise was held in promise once. Hope, and with it desperation, always led. Monsters and beauties: both I encountered on my way. A heavy freight of gifts and plunder I amassed, and with them wounds, and sometimes wisdom, too; they made their marks indelibly on me. Early on, I learned to fashion tools from sticks and bones and flints, and clothes from hides. I lifted megaliths up high. I whispered peace in wild horses’ ears. Metals I conjured from their ores, and beat them to a hundred cunning shapes.
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The heaviest-headed grains I sickled, stored, and sowed. By geometry, I mapped the stars, and drew the plans for city streets. As many artefacts had their origin in me as Need required, and more besides. In making them, with brain and hand alike engaged, I made myself, growing in stature, adding cubits to my mind’s power. From root, to bole, to towering crown, I climbed our evolution’s tree. I swam to the very source of wisdom’s stream, spent time in purgatory, and hell, and came home again. As through timber with a sharp-edged blade, I struck through custom where it counselled wrong, finding the strength to speak alike the unspoken and unspeakable, while keeping safe our most dear. As I discovered them, I named the myriad contents of the universe; dreamed into being things unseen; propounded fundamental truths; landed on the Moon. History was made at my behest, as now. I served as leader, labourer, messenger, and scribe. Laws, pacts, warrants, treaties, codicils, critiques and annals issued from my pen, and poems, too; still, lava-like, they flow and flow. Co-venturers, we have followed, each of us, a similar long route. We are inheritors of the same past, inhabitants of the same Now; nothing our own, all things are shared.
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I have sketched for you, in brief, our narrative so far; but other voices tell a countering tale: I have expunged, they’ll say, a major element of plot, our species’ Fall, namely the class divide that brought such woe into the world, out of a Bronze Age melting pot. Elites took power to own and rule, against the interests of the rest, whose role it was to labour, die, and rot. The class divide: it is our Original (and continuing) Sin, to be redeemed, if ever, only in a Commonweal. (Now there’s another tale to tell!)
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In Brecht’s Bar Who built the seven gates of Thebes? The books are filled with names of kings. Was it kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone? - Bertolt Brecht ‘The Hollow Mountain: ever heard of it?’ He placed his glass next ours, then ‘Seat taken? No?’ - sat down. ‘I overheard you talking. Seems History's your thing; mine, too, though all the dates and names that interest me are never put in any books at all.’ His face was a crumpled grey, the likeness caught, soon after, in a painting, hung now on the bar-room wall. The big man spoke with us, an hour or more, of tunnelling: of howking out the heart of Cruachan when he was young, to hold the dynamo that feeds the country power. Now dead, he is a part himself - a hero in the History he liked to hear.
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Fighting Back The sword sung on the barren heath, The sickle in the fruitful field: The sword he sung a song of death, But could not make the sickle yield. - William Blake ‘This is me,’ she said, lurching, smiling, ‘road-testing my new leg, a wee bit extra every day.’ She slapped her thigh - plastic, maybe; maybe steel then told me, ‘Life's a pig, the way it's shafted me. But I'm fighting back, you know.’ Her aim, as she explained: to walk once more the route she marched, with others, long years past, South, to Parliament, For Jobs Not War. The woman pursed her lips and frowned in pain? in prayer? - then into gear, and off! As if a sailor on the heave and ho of some ship's deck, she staggered fast to where a side street was. There, puffed, at the corner, turning back, she paused and gave two signs: a thumbs-up, then clenched fist.
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Giving Back Riches In praise of Paul Robeson (1898 - 1976) But I keep laffin / Instead of cryin / I must keep fightin / Until I’m dyin... - Paul Robeson after Oscar Hammerstein II Experience showed him a world divided; in his song he held it whole. Carrying a deep wound, his and the world’s, dreaming a generous dream, following the rainbow and the dove, he was a giant, serving the people. Few neared the strength of his standing. In their many tongues, he spoke for the poor, giving back riches. He was Clyde and Volga, Mississippi, Ganges, Amazon and Nile. He was Vesuvius. Against wrong, with his life, all his life, he waged war; he was unbeaten. He is remembered in Glasgow. His echo lingers, loud for those with souls to hear. He sings the world sane.
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Showing a Way We are witnessing an eruption not of lava but of labour, the labour of working men and women... - Jimmy Reid Glasgow Green, 18 August, 1971 Once upon a time - here, in the real world, for this is not a fairy tale a bold idea changed If to That. Imagine, acted on by many, took on the force of hard material fact. This happened many years ago; the place, the shipyards of the Upper Clyde. The wonder is, given the world’s wounds since, the bold idea has not yet died. All rivers have their storied past, in part the same, in part unique. More than a few have known the pride of ships well made and safely launched; and also known, when fortunes ebb, a shadow-side; but here, at UCS, a Labour victory was ours, and Capital, out-classed, endured reversal, and a loosening of its powers. The reason is not hard to seek: big on any scale, a volcano, not of lava but of Labour, burst in flame. The action that eight thousand workers took filled the bright skies of politics. Briefly, social order’s deep assumptions shook. That is the core of Clyde’s especial claim.
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Lame duck, said Capital, dismissive and devaluing of the yards. Never mind the lives invested there, the teeming skills, the order book! Never mind the hinterland they served, that equally in turn served them! Dead duck was what it wished to see, little knowing that our bird would fly, and soar, deriving strength from thousands, then from tens of thousands more. Unite and fight! In tandem, and in full, heeding the maxim’s dual elements, not from the dole outwith the shipyards’ gates, but working from within: there lay the workers’ stratagem, that helped us win. The shipyards’ mail bag, like a farmer’s sack of seed, spilled out its daily bulge of contents: news received of rallies, demonstrations, strikes; well-wishers’ words, and sometimes flowers; and cash, from corner shops, from churches, children, unions, and the whole wide listening world, sums both large and widows’ generous mites, sent in comradeship, to keep the struggle’s fire alight. The yards were saved: the bold idea, in act, had proved its worth. But now, several decades on, what’s left? In place of gain, a creeping dearth.
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Not only ships have sunk, or gone for scrap, but yards as well, and jobs, and skills, and with them, hope. Along the river, as throughout the land, and world, we feel a cutting wind that kills. Economic winter has us in its grip. For Capital, the battle that it lost was clarion-call and school; it learned far more than we. It learned to hone its tools of shock, displace, lay off, and rule. Ganging up and doing down, it made too many of us settle, first for slices of the loaf we made, then beggars’ crusts, then bugger all; ruthlessly, it grabbed again its habitual crown. For us, a tragedy ensued, its playing-out still under way: comrades at loggerheads and each others’ throats; lost sense of purpose and of common cause, parties pulled apart, offering least, not best, resistance in a losing war. What should - what could - we have attempted otherwise; what can we now attempt that’s more? That bold idea that found expression and a home at UCS - how might we have built on it, and built afresh; how might we, even now, still launch upon our carrying stream of deepest need a lengthening line of even bolder plans, and thus contest the power that Capital, to keep its hold, must bring to bear? 23
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The world shifts restlessly; a rising flood of tremors agitates beneath; fresh rifts in what we thought was solid mass appear. Deep energy demands release. Eruptions can’t be far: the forecast’s clear. Present struggle cries to know the complex story of its past. Take it, save it from erasure, or revision’s grasp! What happened here in ’71 and ’2 can be no Terra Nullius of the mind, open for errors to invade: it’s where, ablaze and wise, we entered history, and showed a way whereby a future might be made.
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A Fish Rising The revolution will raise itself up again... it will proclaim: I was, I am, I shall be... - Rosa Luxemburg From the bottom of an ancient pool, said to be bottomless, up to the film of its meeting with the still air, hungry, in search of fly or grub, a fat carp rises. With a barbed kiss, it breaks the surface and the silence of this summer’s day, and eats; then, glidingly, it noses back to the cool of its brown deep, a world away. Romans in their heyday were the first to stock this pool; thereafter, monks hymning their dead and risen god, tended the fish, until in turn their fortunes, like the Romans’, fell. Now, at another epoch's ruined end, the world in flames, I pace the foot-worn path around the pool; heavy with thought, I count the failed resurgences that history has seen, brief flowerings of the people's will. They grew wild, their early promise of a new-style beauty, unremembered now, or else despised.
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Time upon time, the ancient dream of plenty's peace has died; and yet succeeding Calvaries along the way may serve as school and seed of future victory. Eurydice sang, a women’s choir. I had heard them at a May Day years before. Now, at the fish-pool’s side, in my mind’s replay, they sang again, ballads in praise of two dead giants of our foundering cause. Forward tae Glesga Green we’ll march in guid order... Aye there, man, that’s Johnnie noo that’s him there, the bonnie fechter. Lenin’s his fiere, an’ Leibknecht his mate... The one: pale-faced, hoarse-voiced, calling on Scotland all his life to join the world in the world’s people’s saving fight. Jailed and jailed and jailed again, his flesh but not his spirit broke. Stand up and fight and fight! We have a score to settle: This will be our pledge... The other: passionate, an optimist, convinced that everyone can contribute a mite, or more, to all our hope's refashioning, until a soldier’s rifle butt abruptly put a stop to all her eloquence, cracking her proud head like a coconut. Maclean and Luxemburg: their lives’ example burns, sticking in our consciences, reproachfully, like sulphur flames. 28
I see a movement in the pool, a glimpse of mottle, a sun-reflecting curve, a twist of tail and fin. One speck of dirt, or gold, can tip the heaviest-laden balance from the straight. (Taking hope, I count some auguries of hope.) One fact, discrepant with the dogma of the orthodox, can breach its errors' edifice, admitting light. One wound, one cry, one song, one name can travel faster than a Caesar's hate. We are - or might become a force more powerful than earthquakes, cyclones, lava-flows, or a river’s wearing-down of mountains to a peneplain. Slowly rising, the carp begins once more to stir, to swim.
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Pulling the Plug When Church and State amalgamate / Tae preach us Law and Order, / Ye wives and mothers sure as fate Ye’ll ken they’re planning murder... - Mary Brooksbank Those are the eyes of a killer. What hungering void, or dream, or wound consumes behind? Those are the words of a killer. They are the twistings of a well-schooled mind. Those are the hands of a killer. Their gestures constitute a semaphore conveying confidence in power. What command papers have they held, consigning some to death by slow degrees, and some by instant fire? The killer nods, pretends to listen, curves his mouth in a lean grin. I see a shark, in his element, sure of his next and every win. The killer manages a judicious tear. (‘I empathise; I go to church; I care...’) I see an obvious reptile here. The killer laughs. I see an ape, exulting in his dominance. Enough! I cannot thole this monster and his arrogance. I’ve pulled the plug.
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Yes The defenders are not demoralised, nor do they abandon their positions, even among the ruins, nor do they lose faith in their own strength or their own future... - Antonio Gramsci Can wells, that a long drought made bitter, self-restore? Can sparks, scattered from a beaten fire, be raked in, and fed, and made to blaze more brightly than before? Can pages, torn from a precious book, be chased, brought back from a high wind, and then re-bound? Can the green ribbon of a deep song extend to furthest hearts the tug of its dear sound? Can a city, levelled by a shock of nature or of war, stand again, safe on its old ground, attaining more?
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The Tug of It The number of lives that enter any one life is incalculable... - John Berger Sitting among books, listening inwardly, we sense each writer importune: Free me from the limbo of the printed past. Let me join you; let me hear, through you, my silenced tongue at last. Looking at the tools we have, thinking as we work with them, we meet the many hands before us that have altered, useably, their make and fit: a chain of craft runs back, and back, and we can feel the tug of it. Standing in a field of stooks, or wandering the streets of any town, we see at every turn the trace and monument of many folk. That path across the well-worked rigs those whose feet first trod it, those who came each year to plough and sow and harvest, and maintain the ditch, while empires grew, then died... That house or factory or school or shop those who gave to it their given time, in living there and work... They are all accessible through memory to us, and in memory persist.
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Essential Gifts This surely was what you were created for, To make this here a hereafter... - Mary Brooksbank Generations left this land. Emptied glens, and mills and mines grassed-over now, and hard-built hopes knocked flat by the frequent wrecking ball bear witness to a long ebb of clearance, exile, and decline. Driven by hunger and the loaded gun, seeing no future here worth dying for, wave upon living wave, our forebears travelled far, no continent unmarked by the ill or good of their settling there; but this plot of Earth to which we cling, can feast us all, and others too, who join us now, if only tended with a lover’s care. There are riches heaped around, ready for our harvesting, essential gifts of sea and air and common ground. We, by hand and brain, can labour them, creating goods, enough to share. Our class has made a start. Things change; we make them change, as we, like fortune, like the seasons, like the seas’ tides, turn; and, having turned, we see in full the great worth of our now and future land.
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Only in a Commonweal Where the chains of Capitalism are forged, there they must be broken... - Rosa Luxemburg We are the nothings you walk past. Your lowest and least, we live in the margins of your power. Expendable, we fight your many wars. Your triumphs we pay for, but have none. Unheeded and unnamed, we make your schemes come true. Every sweated brick and girder, every milligram and tonne of every building you command is ours. Every furrow ploughed and filled with seed is ours. Your wealth-producing factories, your cities - ours! Day in, day out, we do your work and will. We pipe the water that you need from reservoir to tap; we stitch the clothes that cover up your nakedness; we bake the bread (and cake) you eat. We are your numerous and essential kin. Suffering most, we learn most. Our slave-songs make symphonies; our longings, creeds. We dig your graves.
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Notes So Long The ‘I’ of ‘So Long’ is the voice of the most progressive element of our most productive class in society, in all societies, past and present. An inspiration for the poem was Gordon Childe’s Man Makes Himself. In Brecht’s Bar For the purposes of this poem, the Clutha Vaults, in Glasgow, is renamed Brecht’s Bar, after Bertolt Brecht’s ‘A Worker Reads History’. On 29 November, 2013, a helicopter crashed into The Clutha, with a final death toll of ten. This poem is dedicated to them. The ‘history man’ in the poem and the portrait of him are real, encountered by the author some years before the helicopter crash. The drawing that faces the poem shows not only the setting of the pub but also part of the Ben Cruachan hydro-scheme that the man worked on. Fighting Back In 1993, Elspeth King published a study that opened a lot of eyes, and minds, called The Hidden History of Glasgow’s Women. This half of our past has also been written about by Glasgow Women’s Library, and by the STUC’s Women’s Committee. (See the latter’s Inspiring Women.) The character in ‘Fighting Back’ was bumped into outside Partick Library, in Glasgow. She stands for many. Note: this activist crops up again in the book, in the drawing that accompanies our final poem, where she is in good company, and jubilant. Giving Back Riches Singer, actor, author, scholar, athlete, antifascist, civil rights campaigner, one of the giants of the Black American Harlem Renaissance, Paul Robeson was known and loved by many, the world over, while being hated and persecuted by racists and anti-communists. He visited Glasgow, lending his voice to progressive causes, from the 1930s until his last appearance in 1960, at our May Day march and rally.
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Showing a Way It is not every day, or decade, or even every lifetime, that a few thousand trade unionists so marshal their argument, and focus their fight, that they get a government to execute a U-turn on its sworn policy of butchering their jobs; but that is what the workers at UCS did in 1971-72. After a campaign lasting sixteen months, the shipyard workers of the Upper Clyde, with allies world-wide, saved their yards from the cleaver that had been poised above them. (The butchery metaphor was used by one of the then government ministers himself .) The poem, ‘Showing a Way’, was written for inclusion in a commemorative volume about the Work-in that the author and artist collaborated on, with fifty others, A Rose Loupt Oot (2012). A Fish Rising The two ‘dead giants’ referred to in the poem are John Maclean (1879 – 1923) and Rosa Luxemburg (1870 – 1919). The poem was inspired by, and is a meditation on, Red Rosa’s political writings and speeches. A sub-title for this poem might well be ‘The Experience of Defeat’, which is the title of a book by Christopher Hill about the aftermath of the English Civil War, when democracy and republicanism were forced into a long retreat. Pulling the Plug The politician who is attacked in this poem is a composite of several government ministers, all architects of the UK’s Welfare Reform and Work Bill, 2015. Seeing them on TV prompted the writing of this poem. There is also an added element of an Iraq war-monger here. The histrionics of our composite character are captured in the theatrical masks in our drawing. Yes The green ribbon in the last verse was an emblem worn by the Levellers, who famously Turned the World Upside Down. Their Putney Debates, in 1647, about power and wealth, cry out to be started up again. The dark drawing that faces our poem represents the depth of the ‘No’ that requires negation.
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The Tug of It Politics, like poetry, often benefits from timetravelling, with several tenses essentially involved. Here, in ‘The Tug of It’, we find a sort of Historic Present and a Past Continuous both at work. Our drawing here features a chain of connection, an emblem of inter-dependency between generations. Essential Gifts An early version of this poem appeared in 2012, under the title of ‘Scotland, 2014’. It was intended as a contribution to the epic argument that Scotland was conducting at that time about itself, and with itself, regarding selfdetermination, miscalled independence. (The argument continues.) The poem relies in large measure on the metaphor of tides turning, hinting at the exodus of many poor people at the time of the Clearances, counterbalanced by a more recent inward migration of New Scots. Readers may spot the deliberate misquoting of a phrase from Clause IV of the Labour Party Constitution (1918 edition). There, you will find reference to ‘workers by hand or by brain’, which is a false dichotomy. Here, we prefer ‘hand and brain’, which is more accurate. Only in a Commonweal This poem owes as much to a Marxian Labour Theory of Value as to any other source of inspiration. The drawing reprises some of the characters and themes from earlier poems and drawings. The doves that frequent the pages of the book may be seen as doves of peace, following in the tradition that includes Picasso’s lithograph ‘La Colombe’; or they may be seen as a promise of safety and plenty, as in the Biblical story of Noah. In those instances where a drawing features a trio of doves, the inspiration is the personal symbol drawn by and used by the great biologist, sociologist, geographer, town-planner, and educationalist, Patrick Geddes (1854 – 1932). His three doves stand for Sympathy, Synergy, and Synthesis, all essential parts of his integrative vision.
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After working in the building and shipbuilding industries, across Britain and abroad, Bob Starrett (b. 1938) was a mature student for a while at the Glasgow School of Art. He then moved to working as a scene-painter in the film industry. He is the author of two books. Rattling the Cage, published by Ferret Press (1983), is a collection of his political cartoons. Most famous of his cartoons are those drawn for the UCS Work-in of 1971-72. The Way I See It, published by Fair Pley (2013), is a collection of memoirs, short stories, sketches, and cartoons, reflecting his experience both in shipbuilding and film making. David Betteridge (b. 1941) is a retired teacher and teacher trainer. He has written one collection of poems, Granny Albyn’s Complaint, published by Smokestack Books in 2008, and he has edited a compilation of miscellaneous pieces by fifty hands, celebrating the UCS Work-in of 1971-72, called A Rose Loupt Oot, also published by Smokestack, in 2011. With the graphic designer Tom Malone, he has produced ten poetry pamphlets, under the banner of Rhizome Press. 44
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Slave Songs and Symphonies is an ambitious, beautifully crafted collection of poems, images and epigraphs. It's about human history, progressive art and music, campaigns for political freedom, social justice and peace. Above all it's about the class and cultural struggle of workers 'by hand and by brain’ to regain control and ownership of the fruits of their labour. David Betteridge’s poems are leftist, lyrical, and learned, infused with sadness and compassion for the sufferings of our class, the working class. They are also inspired by visionary hope, and a strong belief that our class-divided society and culture can be transformed by radical politics and good art – and by radical art and good politics. Bob Starrett’s drawings are much more than illustrations. They dance with the poems, commenting on them as well as illustrating them. They are like Goya’s drawings in their dark, ink-black truthfulness and their intimate knowledge of suffering and Blake’s 'mental fight'. Like the poems, they express and resolve the struggles they depict. Slave Songs and Symphonies tells the story of how slave songs become symphonies – and helps makes it happen. It is not just about class and cultural struggle – it is class and cultural struggle.
£5.99