Caldebroc - Antony Rowland

"Antony Rowland digs the word hoard to unearthsinewy lines of dark material - the insides of buriedhistories, public and private. He is an archaeologistof mourning: always alert to the unexpected coinage('Shram bobs the gracht'), these poems pay tribute topeople and places lost and found, whether teenagekinship with the Brontës, a foreboding proximity tothe Yorkshire Ripper, or celebrations of absentfriends. Channelling influences such as GeoffreyHill and Tony Harrison, Rowland sets out a projectuniquely 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."- Scott Thurston"In Antony Rowland's Caldebroc England's Northrevivifies its aural mythmaking. There is a lyricwildness here met with a sonic concatenation that isbreathtaking, precise and tireless - electrifying placeby refuting the nation's view of its marginal regions.Even geographical and linguistic departures bring aparadoxical insiderly displacement. Rowland'spoetics of defamiliarisation, of elsewhere'shabitations within the already-known, ultimatelystands between us - and any sense of home - askingus not where we belong but why."- Sandeep Parmar