The Shadow Knows: Poems 2000-2004

The official elegy for Princess Margaret was the last straw. There had to be an antidote: a poet who would stalk the powerful, the pretentious and the sycophantic. The socialist magazine Red Pepper invited Adrian Mitchell to don the dreaded costume of The Shadow Poet Laureate and write regular people's republican poems for their columns. At a secret midnight ceremony he was decked in the cloak, fedora and blue suede shoes which are the garb of the Shadow. Then he kept popping his head up where he was least wanted by some but most needed by the rest of us, appearing on radio and TV and other platforms to speak for the other side, restoring a radical, subversive voice to the public face of Bri.