Poetry from the UK & Ireland

“Antony Rowland digs the word hoard to unearth
sinewy lines of dark material – the insides of buried
histories, public and private. He is an archaeologist
of mourning: always alert to the unexpected coinage
(‘Shram bobs the gracht’), these poems pay tribute to
people and places lost and found, whether teenage
kinship with the Brontës, a foreboding proximity to
the Yorkshire Ripper, or celebrations of absent
friends. Channelling infl uences such as Geoff rey
Hill and Tony Harrison, Rowland sets out a project
uniquely his own to rework history in these
‘measures against outrages’, always alive to poetry’s
‘guilty retrieval’. These are formidable sequences,
scrupulous to a taint, steeped in the earth.”

“In Antony Rowland’s Caldebroc England’s North
revivifies its aural mythmaking. There is a lyric
wildness here met with a sonic concatenation that is
breathtaking, precise and tireless – electrifying place
by refuting the nation’s view of its marginal regions.
Even geographical and linguistic departures bring a
paradoxical insiderly displacement. Rowland’s
poetics of defamiliarisation, of elsewhere’s
habitations within the already-known, ultimately
stands between us – and any sense of home – asking
us not where we belong but why.”

“It’s rare to find a poet so brilliantly dexterous with
language… In Caldebroc, the reader travels across time
and history – from the Brontës’ Haworth, to Icelandic sagas
and global financial meltdown. Rowland constantly revives
poetic language and,in doing so, uses the full artistic
palette. The effect is both ecstatic and celebratory.”

In a book by Pippa Little I know I will find the kind of directness one can trust. So I wasn’t at all surprised when I opened Time Begins to Hurt on a poem called ‘Churchyard’, and immediately found myself confronted with memory and a sense of recognition that was another’s and yet all too real. That is what Pippa Little does so well. And she does it with wide range, with different modes and various poetics… Which is to say, we recognise ourselves in these pages, our days, our questions. And the pages fortify. Why? Because these are honest, very moving and beautiful poems.

I love this book – it’s fierce bright poems with their fierce bright women. Scattered throughout are lines and images I will carry with me as touchstones, reminders of what makes for good poetry… So many of her poems have a physical, visceral quality which lifts them clean off the page and into your palm. The world of Little’s poems is a dark one where ‘the harm / the damage’ we humans inflict, on the environment and on one another, is rendered unflinchingly. Love is present too, often inextricably bound up with the pain it can cause, but expressed in such startling language, it is its own reward.