Abstract

The work in this collection occupies the exciting middle ground between mainstream and avant-garde poetry. It pushes the monologue form further than it’s ever been before, featuring the history of the beard recounted to a headless cavalier, a sibyl doomed to hairdressing in perpetuity, and an academic obsessed with the power of nineteenth-century barnets. The collection also contains a gastronomic edge, with a eulogy to the pie, an incident from World War One recounted through a tansy-cake, a diatribe against cucumbers, and an elegy for Pontefract’s pomfret cakes. A series of poems engages with the writer’s northern background, but without a flat cap or a greasy whippet in sight.