An austere song of praise to a flower that withstands the battering of nature is also an intense response to classical Greek literature

Sea Rose

Rose, harsh rose,
marred and with stint of petals,
meagre flower, thin,
sparse of leaf,

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Whether by striking workers, poets or Pussy Riot, our feline friends have long been used as a symbol of resistance – radical by nature, they refuse to be tamed

In the 60 years since Julie Andrews sang about the cheering possibilities of whiskers on kittens , the fetishisation of the feline form has only grown stronger. Earlier this year, Somerset House even opened a Hello Kitty caf e as part of its Cute exhibition . By way of balance there is, of course, a jokey online culture about the unspeakable evilness of cats. These are the ones who deliberately sabotage your printer, or post video diaries commenting on the futility of your dating life. But beyond this binary, there is a more nuanced narrative of the cat as a figure that makes a virtue out of complexity and ambivalence. So perhaps we would do better to think of the cat as dissident, oblique, even radical.

Rudyard Kipling caught this attitude best in his Just So Stories of 1902, a series of whimsical origin myths. In The Cat That Walked By Himself, Kipling tells how Wild Dog was the first animal to venture into the cave of stone age humans, attracted by the smell of roast mutton. The dog becomes a couple’s “First Friend”, a devoted and useful hunting companion and security guard who is happy to submit to the collar of domestic servitude. Wild Cow and Wild Horse soon follow suit, eager to labour in return for plenty of hay. Finally comes Wild Cat, who stalks up to the entrance of the dwelling and proceeds to lay down his terms. “I am not a friend, and I am not a servant. I am the Cat who walks by himself, and I wish to come into your cave.”

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The writer, who was adopted as a baby by Scottish communists, on her life in protest, facing racism in suburban Glasgow, and why her late parents are at the heart of her new collection

The Scottish poet and writer Jackie Kay is listening to Jazz Record Requests on the radio when I arrive at her home in Manchester, where she has lived for many years. She was startled recently to hear her own name on the show, when a listener asked for a song by Bessie Smith after reading Kay’s biography of the blues legend. “I grew up in a house filled with jazz,” she says, reaching for her mother’s best teacups – there are macaroons and biscuits on the table. Her parents loved to riff off each other in song: “What a day it has been,” would lead to “What a difference a day makes.”

“Writers often write to grapple with the presence that absence makes,” Kay once said, and two huge absences are at the heart of her latest collection, May Day, her first since the end of her stint as Makar (the poet laureate of Scotland) three years ago. Her parents, Helen and John Kay, Glaswegian communists who adopted Kay as a baby, died within a year and two months of each other: her father at the end of 2019; her mother at the start of 2021. “I had a real awareness that they were kindred souls to me,” she says. Talking about them in the past tense is still painful. “Everybody hesitates around it, like a swimming pool before you dive into the water and you know it’s freezing cold. Sometimes you just forget it, or you muddle the tenses. We should invent a tense that hovers midway.”

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The poet’s uncompromising second collection, about her husband’s addiction to crystal meth, is fascinating and troubling

There is always the temptation to tell it like it wasn’t when a subject is painful. Words can tinker therapeutically, be balm, re-dress – and redress. What impresses most about Ellen Cranitch’s courageous second collection, Crystal , on the subject of her husband’s addiction to crystal meth and its devastations, is her steady rigour in not compromising, not ranting or taking flight, as in her poem Trust, which is claustrophobically reduced to an exchange of glances and a lack of boundaries. There is, throughout, a – crystal – clarity.

Her unexpected starting point is three lyrical poems about Pierre Bonnard’s paintings of his model Renée, who killed herself when he married Marthe, and who is painted in an increasingly abstracted way in the works she is considering. “It is a terrible feeling, to be becoming less distinct,” she observes. There is a slight weirdness in her empathic starting point if only because it borders on a love song to herself: “that strange image I must own” who is “all iridescence”.

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Council contractor says sorry amid anger at removal of artwork of poet from an underpass in Hockley area

A council contractor has apologised after painting over a mural of the late poet and actor Benjamin Zephaniah in Birmingham.

The artwork appeared on the wall of an underpass in Hockley in central Birmingham last month after Zephaniah’s death aged 65 in December.

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Poet who is curating country’s first Venice Biennale pavilion says ‘part of the heart’ of the country was looted and is being held in museums

An Ethiopian cultural surge – including a first national pavilion at the Venice Biennale and the rise of stars such as Ruth Negga and The Weeknd – is making the country’s calls for restitution of looted colonial-era artefacts harder to ignore, according to Lemn Sissay.

The poet and author, who is curating the country’s inaugural Biennale pavilion, where Tesfaye Urgessa ’s work will be on show, said the event would be part of a significant cultural push from the east African country and its diaspora over the last two decades.

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A horrifying story of racial violence told from the point of view of an oak tree bough is all the more disturbing for its imitation of the ballad form

The Haunted Oak

Pray why are you so bare, so bare,
Oh, bough of the old oak tree;
And why, when I go through the shade you throw,
Runs a shudder over me?

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The Iranian-American poet’s debut novel tells the tale of a bereaved writer – but struggles with too much angst

In Martyr!, the debut novel by Iranian-American poet Kaveh Akbar, a troubled young man is searching for a reason to live. Cyrus, the son of an Iranian migrant factory worker in Indiana, lost his mother in an infamous 1988 air disaster, when a US missile cruiser mistakenly shot down an Iranian civilian airliner in the final months of the Iran-Iraq war. This formative trauma has left a terrible legacy: when we meet him, in his late 20s, he’s a recovering alcoholic, struggling with fragile mental health and an unhealthy dependency on pharmaceutical sedatives; he “often wept for no reason, bit his thumbs till they bled”.

An aspiring but unproductive writer, Cyrus has a fixation with martyrdom, and is researching a book on the subject. “It’s not an Islam thing,” he clarifies, “[it’s] about secular, pacifist martyrs. People who gave their lives to something larger than themselves.” To this end he travels to New York and interviews an older, terminally ill Iranian artist, Orkideh, who is exhibiting herself in a Marina Abramović-style exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. They strike up a tender rapport, and Cyrus gradually begins to work through his issues.

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Andrew Stauffer conveys the vigour and pace of the poet’s escapades with brio, but stumbles when he suggests Byron anticipated modern celebrity

Wordsworth called poetry “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”, but in Byron’s case the unstoppable overflow consisted of a more vital and potent bodily fluid. “Is it not life?” he asked about his comic epic Don Juan , the annals of a globe-trotting seducer; he added that his qualification for writing it was that he had “tooled” in a post chaise, a hackney coach, a gondola, against a wall, and both on and under a table. He claimed to do his rhyming, as he nonchalantly called it, “at night / When a Cunt is tied close to my inkstand”, and on receiving royalty cheques from his publisher he vowed that “what I get by my brains I will spend on my bollocks”.

When not drinking, gambling and having sex, Byron also tossed off 3,000 letters, which race to keep up with the flux of his sensations as he reels through adulterous intrigues, literary squabbles and political conspiracies. Here, even more than in Don Juan , he writes while living in an unfinished present tense. Postscripts and interruptions, as Andrew Stauffer says, give his correspondence a “risky immediacy”, with “rapid-fire, time-stamped updates”; punctuation increases the tempo in a blitz of breathless dashes.

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