Starting from Anywhere"Starting from Anywhere is based upon the generous belief that poetry can begin with anything: a painting, a line from another poem, or even how perfectly ordinary things can 'balk account'. The urgency underlying these quiet poems reveals how the eye and imagination can, must, or perhaps simply will, remake the world. "From the first poem, 'In My Alternate Life', through the volume's mid point a short prose piece called 'When Fictions Are Facts',

writer and cultural advisor Issa Makhlouf

' confesses the narrator of Midcentury

Andy Simons wrote in his review in Race and Class that the book is "valuable as social history" and Thompson’s story "is one of honour in everyday life"

anthologist and scholar

• Woody Allen

While the lord was busy by the borders of the wood the bold Gawain kept to his soft bed

Dictionary for the Idle includes chapters on:

moving forward to 1983 when the US invaded to put an end to a radical experiment that had turned violently in on itself

Salah Niazi

Peter Clark reviews Modern Arabic Literature by Paul Starkey

Malek Haddad: Poems

Best of Irish Poetry 2009 (Southword Editions) and Identity Parade: New British and Irish Poets (Ed Roddy Lumsden