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carcanet.bsky.social
Carcanet Press
@carcanet.bsky.social
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Award-winning publisher of modern, classic and translated poetry, and the bi-monthly literary journal @pnreview.bsky.social.
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carcanet.bsky.social
Pre-order now using the code NOVBOOKS10 for 10% off and free UK P&P from our website checkout.
www.carcanet.co.uk/978180017517...
Answerlands
Answerlands is the place children go in their minds when looking for a correct answer without really thinking. It is also a fairy-tale world of quest, resolu...
www.carcanet.co.uk
November 13, 2025 at 2:50 PM
carcanet.bsky.social
Joe Minden’s second collection, Answerlands, explores the curiosity-destroying, harmful potential of school even as it celebrates the erring minds of teacher and student, which make encounter possible.
November 13, 2025 at 2:50 PM
carcanet.bsky.social
And it is nightmare country, disfigured by fear and systemic violence.
November 13, 2025 at 2:50 PM
carcanet.bsky.social
It is also a fairy-tale world of quest, resolution and dissolution, glimpsed in a teacher's dream.
November 13, 2025 at 2:50 PM
carcanet.bsky.social
Answerlands is the place children go in their minds when looking for a correct answer without really thinking.
November 13, 2025 at 2:50 PM
Reposted by Carcanet Press
asls.org.uk
‘I am not prepared to let Moscow dictate to Glasgow.’
Failures may be interesting, but it is the firmness
of what he wanted and did not want
that raises eyebrows…

—Edwin Morgan, “On John Maclean”
from COLLECTED POEMS, @carcanet.bsky.social 1997
#poem #poetry
www.carcanet.co.uk/978184777965...
Edwin Morgan On John Maclean ‘I am not prepared to let Moscow dictate to Glasgow.’ Failures may be interesting, but it is the firmness of what he wanted and did not want that raises eyebrows: when does the quixotic begin to gel, begin to impress, at what point of naked surprise? ‘I for one will not follow a policy dictated by Lenin until he knows the situation more clearly.’ Which Lenin hadn’t time to, and parties never did – the rock of nations like the rock of ages, saw-toothed, half-submerged, a cranky sputtering lighthouse somewhere, as often out as lit, a wreck of ships all round, there’s the old barnacled ‘Workingclass Solidarity’, and ‘International Brotherhood’ ripped open and awash, while you can see the sleekit ‘Great-Power Chauvinism’ steaming cannily past on the horizon as if she had never heard of cuius regio. Maclean wanted neither the maimed ships nor the paradox of not wanting them while he painfully trimmed the lighthouse lamp to let them know that Scotland was not Britain and writs of captains on the Thames would never run in grey Clyde waters. Well, nothing’s permanent. It’s true he lost – a voice silenced in November fog. Party is where he failed, for he believed in people, not in partiinost’ that as everyone knows delivers the goods. Does it? Of course. And if they’re damaged in transit you make do? You do – and don’t be so naive about this world! Maclean was not naive, but ‘We are out for life and all that life can give us’ was what he said, that’s what he said.
November 12, 2025 at 6:51 PM