Caldebroc

<p>"Antony Rowland digs the word hoard to unearth</p><p>sinewy lines of dark material - the insides of buried</p><p>histories, public and private. He is an archaeologist</p><p>of mournin always alert to the unexpected coinage</p><p>(''Shram bobs the gracht''), these poems pay tribute to</p><p>people and places lost and found, whether teenage</p><p>kinship with the Brontës, a foreboding proximity to</p><p>the Yorkshire Ripper, or celebrations of absent</p><p>friends. Channelling influences such as Geoffrey</p><p>Hill and Tony Harrison, Rowland sets out a project</p><p>uniquely his own to rework history in these</p><p>''measures against outrages'', always alive to poetry''s</p><p>''guilty retrieval''. These are formidable sequences,</p><p>scrupulous to a taint, steeped in the earth."</p><p>- Scott Thurston</p><p><br></p><p>"In Antony Rowland''s Caldebroc England''s North</p><p>revivifies its aural mythmaking. There is a lyric</p><p>wildness here met with a sonic concatenation that is</p><p>breathtaking, precise and tireless - electrifying place</p><p>by refuting the nation''s view of its marginal regions.</p><p>Even geographical and linguistic departures bring a</p><p>paradoxical insiderly displacement. Rowland''s</p><p>poetics of defamiliarisation, of elsewhere''s</p><p>habitations within the already-known, ultimately</p><p>stands between us - and any sense of home - asking</p><p>us not where we belong but why."</p><p>- Sandeep Parmar</p>