This was officially announced back on 9 October but I only noticed today when a copy of Forward flopped onto my doormat with the information on the back page.
Meanwhile, 13 year old Megan Bradbury is the new Birmingham Young Poet Laureate.
Here’s Chris Morgan’s poem The Car Body Plant:
I always cycled in through pre-dawn
gloom, it seemed, for the 7.15 start,
yellow and sweating beneath my cape,
just one of a tide of half-asleeps
flowing into that infernal manufactory,
smoke-city of the blood-red night, each
of us squeezed into a terrifying conformity;
for them, fat pay-packets like an addiction.My green boiler-suit, APPRENTICE
on chest pocket, possessed me,
marking me out, to be sent
for left-handed screwdrivers, for tubs
of elbow grease, for a laff. My O levels
and RP accent made me an outsider,
fuelled a mutual misunderstanding,
and a soupcon (my word, not theirs) of guilt.Huge presses shook the floor, crunching
improbable shapes from steel sheets,
Richter six point something as I walked past;
older press operators all lacked
a finger, blood sacrifice to inattention;
hearing dimmed by decades of carcrash;
I never asked about their hearts or souls.
On assembly lines, spotwelding gunswere like futuristic weapons from a movie,
spitting chains of sparks across gangways
as their superhero crab-claws pinched,
and the air smelled sharply of lung-
destroying metal dust. Always loud hissing
and screeching, as of dying breaths,
as bodies were tortured into shape