Caldebroc

"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 influences such as Geoffrey 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." - Scott Thurston "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." - Sandeep Parmar