Cover image is adapted from a publicity still of
English music hall performer Charles Penrose 
posing as the eponymous ‘Laughing Policeman’
(Columbia Records, 1926)

English Laughter | Cyberwit (India/US), 2026 | Paperback, 100pp | ISBN 978-93-6354-056-9   Can be ordered here

In Alan Morrison’s fourteenth poetry collection, and his second with Cyberwit, war and conflict are tackled, both contemporary and historical, and how cultural figures get caught up in them. There are poems concerning how war trauma affected men of letters after active service, those who survived it—First World War poets Ivor Gurney, David Jones, G.A. Studdert Kennedy (‘Woodbine Willie’)—and those who did not—Spanish Civil War poet Christopher Caudwell, and Second World War poet Drummond Allison.

There are verse-studies of two wildly different figures who each tried to escape their all-encompassing reputations, French poet prodigy Arthur Rimbaud, and English scholar-turned-desert idol T.E. Lawrence (‘of Arabia’). There are valedictions to Welsh luminaries, poet Dylan Thomas, and screen actor and supreme poetry reciter, Richard Burton. A more incidental theme concerns sound and hearing—bells, telephones, trumpets, tinnitus, and music, including tributes to filmic composers Jerome Moross and Malcolm Arnold.

Most fundamentally, English Laughter is concerned with the resurfacing of fascism and the normalisation of racism across the twenty-first century West, with poems addressing the rise of Faragism and the far right ‘Raise the Colours’ flag campaigns in the UK. As with much of Morrison’s work, there is a hauntological aura of rose-tinted pasts and long-postponed futures.

www.youtube.com/@EnglishLaughterPoems/shorts