For over thirty years Keith Armstrong has been taking his poetry to what John Donne called 'the round earth's imagined corners' - giving poetry readings in the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Poland, Iceland, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Spain, Sweden, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, the United States, Jamaica, Kenya and Cuba. At the same time he has been exploring some of the imagined corners of his native North East of England, its sometimes heroic past and its post-industrial discontents. Imagined Corners brings together, for the first time, poems from all the corners of Keith Armstrong's imagination. It's a trumpet call to those who, in the words of John Donne, are the victims of: 'war, dearth, age, agues, tyrannies,/ Despair, law.' It is a manifesto for the public ownership of poetry. It's a hymn to a broken internationalism. And it's a beery love-poem for the North East of England.

Imagined Corners

Literature & Fiction

Armstrong, Keith

Poetry

Smokestack Books

An epic of the wild Northumbrian coast, invoking history, myth and memory. First broadcast on BBC Radio 4. No road leads to Dunstanburgh Castle; but over the course of a year Katrina Porteous, who lives within sight of this lonely Northumbrian ruin, visited it in all weathers, minutely observing its seasonal changes. The result is this poem, first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in February 2004. Dunstanburgh draws on the local legend of a child trapped in the rock and of the Seeker who must search for her; on the memory of raids by Scots reivers; and on the political ideal of 'good lordship' which the castle was built to embody. Using chants, dialect and the wild music of the castle itself - kittiwakes, skylarks, swallows, waves, wind and rain - the poem evokes the secret history, human and natural, of this mysterious, windswept place.

Dunstanburgh

Porteous, Katrina

Town-boy meets Square-boy. The inner-city meets the suburbs. Town is an exploration of the conflicting mentalities of the country and the city. It's a compelling tale of love, ambition and class. It's a study in English suburban misery and an indictment of a divisive education system. It's an epic poem about failure in loving, failure in living.

Town

Dent, Alan

Admired by Marx, quoted by August Bebel in the Reichstag, published by Rosa Luxemburg on the eve of the Spartakist uprising, banned by the Nazis, re-written by Brecht and by Wolf Biermann, Heine's Germany: A Winter's Tale is one of the most political poems in European history. It is also one of the most entertaining, sometimes called 'the wittiest feuilleton in world literature'. Published four years before the revolutions of 1848, it reflects the extent of Heine's friendship with Marx, and takes beautifully-judged satiric swipes at Prussian expansionism, German Romanticism, liberal complacency and a swarm of Heine's fellow writers. A work of sly wit, magical realism and epicurean relish, polemic and fantasy, the poem looks forward prophetically to the German future. Heine's chief concerns - exile, war and revolution, art and propaganda, political repression and cultural identity, the threat of hyper-power hegemony - are as relevant today as they were one hundred and sixty years ago.

Germany: A Winter's Tale

HEINE, HEINRICH

Lightyear is the story of a journey from January to December, a walk through the seasons, a year full of outdoor danger and delights. Inspired by the Swedish poet Staffan Sderblom's 'Six October Poems', Lightyear tracks the calendar changes of time and the elements on the body-in-the-landscape. The poems were written in over a three year period, in the country and in the city, in North London, Cornwall, Scotland, Greece and the French Alps. Lightyear is a book for all weathers. With stunning black and white photographs.

Lightyear

Fell, Alison

Tough is the bitter-sweet taste of urban romanticism, barbecued bear and the bright lights of Grangetown, from the biggest mouth on Teesside. Poet Andy Willoughby goes back to the estates where you have to be tough to survive. Sometimes he acts tough, sometimes he talks tough. Sometimes he is not so tough after all. Tough is his first full-length collection. If you don't like it - tough.

Tough

Willoughby, Andy

The title sequence of The Erotics of God is a series of meditations on the theology of desire and the value of eroticism. Sebastian Barker stands in the tradition which includes Patrick Kavanagh, Blake, Bernard of Clairvaux, Origen, and The Song of Songs. He considers the immanence in sexual love of the beautiful and the sublime, the mortal and the sacred. In the second part, Spirit of the River, he sets art and friendship, which draw us towards 'the crazy colours of the sun', against 'the termite men', who drive us towards 'the abyss'. The Erotics of God is a stunning and original collection, which combines Barker's distinctive lyricism and scholarship with common sense and wit. It completes his visionary trilogy, Damnatio Memoriae: Erased from Memory (Enitharmon, 2004) and The Matter of Europe (Menard Press, 2005). 'A brilliant and original voice.'-Harold Pinter

The Erotics of God: The Soul of Sweet Delight Can Never Be Defil'd

BARKER, Sebastian

Brings together poems written by the distinguished poet Arnold Rattenbury over a sixty year period. The earliest was published on the eve of D-Day; the last was written as part of the campaign to save the Community Hospital in Blaenau Ffestiniog in North Wales, where Rattenbury lived. These poems are written in many different voices - public and private, personal and political, lyrical and satirical. Some are new, others are uncollected or from unfinished books. An extract from a verse-play rubs shoulders with a chapter from an unpublished verse novel. Idiosyncratic, technically brilliant and eloquent with passionate anger, Several Forms of Speech features a cast of painters and paintings, clowns and mummers, friends and foes. It's a book about art and love, empire and war, faith and community. And it is a reaffirmation of the necessity of Revolution.

Several Forms of Speech

Rattenbury, Arnold

Tom Wintringham (1898-1949) was a man of action, a revolutionary, a soldier and a poet. During the First World War he served in the Royal Flying Corps; in the Spanish Civil War he commanded the British Battalion of the International Brigade ; in the Second World War he was the driving force and inspiration behind the establishment of the Home Guard. He was a founder member of the Communist Party, and one of the twelve Communist leaders jailed for 'sedition' in 1925. Expelled in 1938 from the Communist Party, Wintringham co-founded the Commonwealth Party and almost won a famous war-time by-election. His poetry was published in many magazines, and he wrote numerous books. Drawing on the newly opened Wintringham archive, this book contains nearly all Tom Wintringham's poems, many of which are published here for the first time. From the Great War and the October Revolution, via the General Strike to Spain and war against Hitler, Wintringham's poems are a unique record of those revolutionary years, a compelling cocktail of ideas and imagination, romance, realism and action.

We're Going On!: The Collected Poems of Tom Wintringham

Wintringham, Tom

Lightning of Your Eyes: New and Selected Poems

Searle, Chris

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