{"id":14698,"date":"2022-06-27T09:10:10","date_gmt":"2022-06-27T08:10:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/declarations-of-love\/"},"modified":"2022-06-27T09:10:10","modified_gmt":"2022-06-27T08:10:10","slug":"declarations-of-love","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/declarations-of-love\/","title":{"rendered":"Declarations of Love"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\" size-full wp-image-14696\" src=\"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/48d890cd826326e9a53289fa7114cca6.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1128\" height=\"1674\" srcset=\"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/48d890cd826326e9a53289fa7114cca6.jpg 1128w, http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/48d890cd826326e9a53289fa7114cca6-600x890.jpg 600w, http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/48d890cd826326e9a53289fa7114cca6-202x300.jpg 202w, http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/48d890cd826326e9a53289fa7114cca6-297x441.jpg 297w, http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/48d890cd826326e9a53289fa7114cca6-768x1140.jpg 768w, http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/48d890cd826326e9a53289fa7114cca6-1035x1536.jpg 1035w, http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/48d890cd826326e9a53289fa7114cca6-1x1.jpg 1w, http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/48d890cd826326e9a53289fa7114cca6-7x10.jpg 7w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1128px) 100vw, 1128px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>This collection of beautifully illustrated love poems ranges from protesting the inequities and cruelties of our fragmenting world to delight in the variety and beauty of creation, and from a fierce compassion for the &#8216;cry of the poor&#8217; to tender recollections of family and friends. These poems evince a radical empathy that lives electrically on the page.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Aitken\u2019s poems are illustrated by Martin Gollan, whose dynamic penmanship carries a similar sense of energy and defiance. Gollan\u2019s illustrations lend Aitken\u2019s work an urgency and immediacy, emphasizing the poems\u2019 enmeshment in the ever-changing political world.<\/p>\n<p>Yet throughout it all, love endures, and is the badge of our endurance. Love makes endurance possible. This \u2018going on\u2019 is also a poetic method: a refusal to lose heart and hope, to attend to those moments of joy and triumph as well as those of pain and suffering. This collection holds all of these experiences with an equal measure of tenderness and ferocity. It is socialist writing at its humane best.<\/p>\n<p><em>Jim Aitken\u2019s poems protest against the world\u2019s injustice and unfairness, but they are underpinned\u00a0<\/em><em>by something quieter and perhaps mightier than rage, and that is compassion.\u2019<\/em>\u2014James Robertson<\/p>\n<p><em>\u2018Declarations of Love\u2019 is an exceptional collection. In poem after poem the makar demonstrates his ability to put the reader in the position of the countless victims of the world\u2019s broken and corrupt politics and ruthless financial exploitation systems. Yet he does so through the canny choice of telling images, through creating empathy with the subjects of his poetry rather than using the sledgehammer of a hectoring voice. Jim Aitken\u2019s poems are about people and his care for people shines through. Yet he is fearless in standing up against those who would deny us our identities. This is poetry that comes from the head and the heart in equal measure. It shows us what could be. For that reason it is memorable and deserves the widest audience.\u2019<\/em>\u2014William Hershaw<\/p>\n<div><em><strong>Declarations of Love<\/strong>, poems by Jim Aitken with drawings by Martin Gollan, 88pps.,\u00a014 colour and 2 B&#038;W images, ISBN 978-1-912710-49-2, \u00a312 inc. p. and p.<\/em><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\" size-full wp-image-12064\" src=\"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/11\/pixel.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" border=\"0\" \/><\/div>\n<form action=\"https:\/\/www.paypal.com\/cgi-bin\/webscr\" method=\"post\" target=\"paypal\"><input name=\"cmd\" type=\"hidden\" value=\"_s-xclick\" \/> <input name=\"hosted_button_id\" type=\"hidden\" value=\"PMFRS4J47FU7J\" \/> <input alt=\"PayPal \u2013 The safer, easier way to pay online!\" name=\"submit\" src=\"https:\/\/www.paypalobjects.com\/en_GB\/i\/btn\/btn_cart_LG.gif\" type=\"image\" \/> <img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\" size-full wp-image-12064\" src=\"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/11\/pixel.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" border=\"0\" \/><\/form>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This collection of beautifully illustrated love poems ranges from protesting the inequities and cruelties of our fragmenting world to delight in the variety and beauty of creation,&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":371,"featured_media":14696,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1667],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14698","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-our-publications-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14698","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/371"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14698"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14698\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14696"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14698"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14698"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14698"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}