If you got any book tokens for Christmas, can I suggest you spend £9.99 of them on Kate Tempest’s latest book of poetry Hold Your Own?

Tempest is better known as a performance poet, holding her own in the halls alongside the John Cooper Clarkes and Scroobius Pips of this world.

But Hold Your Own sees her stepping into the world of traditional “slim volume verse,” publishing a book of poems to be read as well as heard.

And she steps in with style, bringing the grit of performance poetry as well as working with the more formal world of written verse.

The book is based on the myth of Tiresias’s encounter with the gods told as if on the grimy streets of London. The tension between the down to earth and divine drives the poems.

The first poem tells Tiresias’s story — which is a typically barmy Greek myth about a boy who becomes a woman and then a man (thanks to some magic screwing snakes), in which he is asked by the Gods for his opinion on whether men or women enjoy sex more and gets made into a blind prophet for his honest answer.

It’s a 14-page narrative poem with crazy god-driven stuff happening among the “cigarettes and spit” of the contemporary back streets.

The contrast between the wasteground filled with shopping trolleys and used condoms and the miraculous transformation is dramatic and comic and moving. The parallel contrast between the demotic language and the formality of the poetry adds bite. Tempest’s rhymes are fluid, although very occasionally thud a bit hard for the page.

The rest of the poems use the Tiresias myth to riff on what it means to be a girl or a boy or a man or a woman, and to play with some prophecy.

They often mix gritty realism with passionate romanticism — love poems have furious arguments in them as well as fervent love and are the more moving for it. There is a constant battle between the human heart and the “hatred” and “boredom” of regular life.

All of the poems are about the struggles of real life and so in that sense political. But the last section — Blind Profit — is of particular interest to Morning Star readers. Tempest ends her book with a series of direct, political poems.

They include my favourite Progress, which is a great retelling of 300 years of human history, including the move from feudalism to capitalism, the existential crisis caused by the death of god and the prison of the “free market.” Only Tempest does it in sharp, economical, aphoristic couplets.

If you didn’t get a book token but do have some Christmas cash left over, then Tempest is also playing live in Britain through February.

Either in person or on the page, she shows she’s got sharp, important things to say and the poetic skills to say them.

The price of torture

One of the really shocking aspects of the recent Senate Intelligence Committee report on torture is the revelation that the CIA paid a company run by two ex-US Air Force (USAF) psychologists $81 million to design and run torture sessions.

The torture including beating, sleep disruption (being kept awake for 180 hours), cold (one prisoner died of hypothermia) and other grotesque practices at CIA “black sites.”

But I want to look at the $81m rather than the torture.

First, briefly, on the torture. The CIA designed their torture using psychologists who had ran a programme to train US Air Force pilots how to behave if they were captured and tortured by an enemy power. They “reverse-engineered” it and, unsurprisingly, came up with torture.

There were service personnel who could do the job, so why pay out so much to ex-service personnel?

As the report makes clear, the CIA fully privatised their programme of pain. The report says: “Contract psychologists devised the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques and played a central role in the operation, assessments and management of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program. By 2005, the CIA had overwhelmingly outsourced operations related to the program.”

This contracting out went beyond James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, the two ex-USAF psychologists designing the torture. The report says that by 2008 “contractors made up 85 per cent of the workforce for detention and interrogation operations.”

Lots of modern governments are keen on privatisation. But privatising imprisonment and torture seems to break new ground.

The reason they threw money at the contract torturers appears in a 2001 CIA memo laying down rules for their secret prison. The memo worried that as “captured terrorists may be held days, months, or years, the likelihood of exposure will grow over time.”

They were particularly worried about “media exposure” which might “inflame public opinion.”

So the memorandum recommended a prison where the CIA’s role would be limited to “oversight, funding and responsibility.” The CIA would “contract out all other requirements to other US government organisations, commercial companies and, as appropriate, foreign governments.”

Paying commercial companies, and sometimes foreign governments, was seen as a way of keeping responsibility at arm’s length and hiding the possibility of exposure.

It also means that, now the torture is exposed, there are fewer official documents.

The $81m was shut-up money — it kept the torturers willing and quiet. It took the torture out of the chain of command and hence away from any potential official complaints. This is partly an old CIA strategy of hiding dirty secrets with “deniable” companies.

So the CIA funded private airline Air America was used for dirty Vietnam War undercover operations. It is also part of a very modern tendency to privatise war.

This military privatisation has thrown up disaster after disaster in the “war on terror” — the Blackwaters, Halliburtons as well as these private torturers.

The Iraq and Afghanistan failures have prompted a retreat by US and British forces but they have not damped this enthusiasm for privatising war.