We cannot acknowledge Christmas this year without looking to that part of the world where it all began. All we can do is hope that the genocide in and decimations of Gaza will stop, the illegal incursions into the West Bank end and that the remaining Israeli hostages will be able to go home. We hope, too, that hostilities in other parts of the world will cease: the Russian and Saudi aggressions in Ukraine and Yemen, respectively; the internal horrors of Sudan, Syria and other parts of the world.
What has also been apparent, however, is the role that poetry in particular has played in highlighting and confronting the darkness. We need to hang onto that, to keep doing what many of us in the poetry community have been doing. A conversation with a senior businessman, who had told me that ‘genocide’ was not a word they could use at work in connection with Israeli actions in Gaza – after which I said that the poetry community had been using it since the beginning – ended with his point that it was always the poets who would tell it like it is.
So thank-you to those who keep IS&T going: to editor Helen Ivory; to Chloe Elliott, Prerana Kumar and Kayleigh Jayshree who have all been editing interns this year; to those who submit to us and who read the work published here; to those who follow us on our social media accounts – Instagram, Facebook and X – and who share our posts; and to those who have contributed to and bought our books.
And a final thought for the loss of the leading light in UK poetry that was Gboyega Odubanjo, who edited the Uprising & Resistance anthology for us this year – and worked with the artists and poets as part of this Spread the Word project – and was a contributing poet to its 2021 predecessor, Runaways London. He continues to be much missed.
Kate Birch
Publisher