The news has become so bad it’s difficult to find the words to write about it. That’s how I feel, sometimes, at least. But luckily Attila the Stockbroker has not been left speechless. The veteran punk poet has been publishing books of poetry since 1986, and it’s comforting to know he is still at it, as long as you don’t find the title of his latest collection, Fiery Words for Hellish Times, too much to take.

These poems were written between 2020 and 2025, “and a bit of 2026”. ‘The Optimist’, written in January 2025, sums up his position: “While they tell me I’m spreading ‘fake news’/ And the internet swallows their poison / I refuse to succumb to the blues.”

In this collection he looks back at Rock Against Racism in the 1970s (“Now it’s back / in a different guise” – ‘Never Again, Again’); laments that ‘Every Day The Clocks Go Back’; and rails against ‘The Lucky Generation’, who he feels sold out the welfare state:

 

     But now the Bevan dream is dead

     And who sealed its fate?

     The very generation whom

     It sought to educate!

 

One of his more recent poems is titled ‘Time to Go, Starmer’. Yet Attila’s political rage is intermingled with love poems to his wife Robina. The collection opens with a poem dedicated to her on their silver anniversary. He takes pride in the fact that she is “now a local councillor – I’m still a punk rock poet”. Elsewhere in the collection he notes that he and Robina are “still members of the Labour Party (just!)”.

There are poems about trans women, after the WI banned them; in praise of Yugoslavia’s Tito; his coin collection, with an anti-monarchy sting; the Great Replacement conspiracy theory; Afghanistan; Grenfell Tower; Morecambe poetry festival (“In forty years I’ve never played / A better one than that”; a ‘shipping forecast’ poem about the 2024 Labour party conference (Smooth, becoming variable, veering slowly, losing identity”); his brush with bladder cancer; the National Poo Museum (in the Isle of Wight, since you ask).

Remarkably, in 2024 he was invited to North Korea, but “they uninvited me because a) they had Covid, and b), I refused to wear a suit on stage”. There’s also a pandemic poem:

 

     This loud and forceful poet won’t be told

     That I am somehow ‘sheeplike’ and ‘controlled’

     Because I wear a mask for common good

     And do the things that caring people should.

 

As Attila says, “the last word goes to the young”. The final poem in the collection, ‘Dear Grandad’, says: “You don’t believe in climate change / And we think that’s unfair / That you decide our future / Although you won’t be there.” The final stanza is also worth quoting:

 

     Why do you read that newspaper

     And say that you agree

     And tell us you know better

     Because you’re 73?

     Now we deserve a future

     We know you’ll make a fuss

     But we both really mean this -

     It’s the Daily Mail or us.

 

In a foreword Attila sums up the philosophy that runs through this collection, and all his others too: “I’m very lucky to be supremely self-confident and optimistic by nature. I don’t do depression or resignation. I dedicate this book to anyone picking it up who feels completely beaten down by the never-ending stream of bad news, in the hope that my words will make you strength – and make you smile, too.”

It should also be noted that Fiery Words for Hellish Times is published by Manchester’s Flapjack Press. Attila has self-published six previous books, but he says: “I saw what they were doing for performance poetry and wanted some of it.”

 

Attila the Stockbroker, Fiery Words for Hellish Times, Flapjack Press, £10

 

Attila the Stockbroker will be launching this collection with a reading on Thursday 30 April at Manchester Central Library at 6pm. Free entry. More details