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since I’ve been away for a few days you might already have seen the following announced in Facebook—which is “An Essay on Spam” by Alistair Noon, which is a 400-line poem in heroic couplets on spam in all (or most) of its guises, including poetical spam.I feel pleased to have got this into the Review soon after Martin Thom’s Fair which is another 400 line poem likewise in classical metre on Britain’s involvement in the arms trade. Thom’s is not pentameters but the short couplet as of Swift, associated with satire, seemingly violated quite a lot, though that may not have been the actual template.I think these two texts show in their ways the voices of actual critical and practical historical continuity raised into being against the present collapse of politics, without any devious interiorisation or deferment.And as if these were not enough five new poems by Emily Critchley—