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For the past 50 years, Mircea Dinescu has been one of Romanian poetry’s most provocative and obstinately singular poets. After starting out as a writer of highly musical poetry that he spun round in his fingers with the aplomb of a magician who refuted reality, he ended up stuck in free verse, impelled mainly because of the surrealism of a world in which the label and the content of any box seldom matched. After his first gratuitous exercises when he was 22 and striving to commit himself to love poetry, he was surprised to discover that he had created a poetry of sly political allusion. He was like that communist worker employed in a factory producing bicycle parts who, stealing a tiny wheel one day, a few nuts and bolts on another, a gear, then taking home a chain and a length of pipe, until finally realising to his amazement that however he assembled these parts, instead of a bicycle the result was a Russian machine gun. The dictator at whom Dinescu shot his metaphors was eventually shot with real bullets by his own henchmen. Unlike Dinescu, those men were able to see the difference between a bicycle and a machine gun: later on, disguising themselves as anti-communists, they pedalled their bicycles into the brave new consumer society. A quarter of a century and more since the fall of communism, Mircea Dinescu still hesitates to think of himself as witness, judge or defendant. Like an agile monkey, he jumps into and out of the handbook of literature, just as into and out of the handbook of history, where he is mentioned on page 16, in the chapter entitled Revolutions. In 1989, Dinescu was liberated from house arrest by a large crowd in Bucharest who carried him triumphantly to the national television building. There he announced to his country and the world, with actor Ion Caramitru, that the dictator had fled. The country changed almost overnight from communist to capitalist, but Dinescu carried on doing what he’d always done: writing necessary poems that challenge all systems.

The Bees is Carol Ann Duffy’s first collection of poems as Poet Laureate. In it she uses her full poetic range: there are drinking songs, love poems, poems of political anger; there are elegies, too, for beloved friends, and – most movingly – the poet’s own mother.

The provocative wordsmith is back: this time with her first novel, The Conquest of the Red Man. It is the story of Corinne Zed, a penniless bourgeoise who makes a meagre living from writing. She decides, at the age of 39, to add a little piquant to her life – rich people are so boring – and experience romantic passion at long last. What could be more exciting than falling in love with a leftist who, in a previous life, planted bombs? The problem is that she loves to eat. It’s not reasonable to start a revolution when it’s time to eat and drink champagne. By the way, is revolution edible?

Always on the scout for her next great meal, Corinne experiences a political-literary love story that takes her from right to left, from Stendhal to Lenin and from Brussels to New York via Turin and Paris. Even if she discovers how to make a grand entrance into Leftie-land, will her dreams be fulfilled?

This caustic novel contains a generous dose of gustatory eroticism, fabulously crunchy nuggets, and a blow-job that would make Lenin turn bright red. Politics is never far away, but nothing gets in the way of the pleasure of reading – proof that the left is dissolvable in irony. It is also a sharp chronicle of our society.