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Dear Bob is a series of snap-shots of life in Middlesbrough in the early 1930s. Each week Bob's mam writes to him on HMS Norfolk, giving him all the news from the town. It's the height of the Depression and Teesside is badly hit by unemployment and the Means Test. Life is certainly tough for Mam and her neighbours in Grove Hill. But Mam always finds something to smile about. There is a cast of hilarious and unforgettable characters: Dad with his nose in the Dictionary, little Jimmy with his nose inside a comic, the unemployed who put the world to rights every day in Stan Cole's shed, Ta Ta Pet the insurance-man, above all Mam herself, who tells the story with typical Teesside wit, warmth and wisdom.

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Dear Bob 2 continues the wonderful snap-shots of life in Middlesbrough in the early 1930s, which began in the sell-out original Dear Bob. Each week Bob’s Mam writes to him on HMS Norfolk with the news from the town. Life is tough for Mam and her neighbours in Grove Hill, but as before she can find things to smile about. The cast of unforgettable characters continues in all its hilarious detail: Dad still has his dictionary close to his nose, Stan Cole’s shed is the place where the unemployed men put the world to rights, Ta Ta Pet is still collecting the insurance and spreading the gossip. Mam is her strong self, telling the story with well-observed Teesside wit, warmth and wisdom.

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Keith Porritt’s poems explore the largely disappeared world of heavy industry, its intensive and awe-inspiring physical labour, its dangers and deaths. Memories of his own work and people, fascination in the detailed processes of that work, celebration of the men who taught him, pleasure in his own craftsmanship: he reveals all these through a language that makes impressive and popular poetry from the hard and resistant materials of industry, technology and science and expresses his pride in Teesside’s heritage and future.

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'Each poem conveys an individual world. The reader becomes a detective in a passionate puzzlement well worth solving.' - Pete Morgan

Shirley Hetherington's poems carry an artist's observations: light, colour and details play across witty and sympathetic commentaries on childhood, family, art and love. Her family involvement with generations of women, together with Amy Johnson, Madame Bonnard and others, creates a significant thematic movement which culminates in the title poem's assertion of freedom.

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Sheila Nichols writes about the Aberdeen of her childhood and early adulthood. Dancing between past and present, strongly rooted in the physical world, these poems evoke a lost Scotland with clarity and wit.

‘Strong, unsentimental poems that do not stray into self-indulgence. Nichols is not one for navel- gazing – her eye is too acute, and her political conscience too active… her work is ‘ecstatic as acid drops/ when honey dissolves to tartness/sharp as a spike.’ Mandy Sutter

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John Harrison is a not-quite-ancient-mariner, a curmudgeonly bard of the East Cleveland bus-stops. His poems hold us with inescapable roadside meditations on the job, the sack, kids, what they get up to, relationships that fizzle out. Follow him through eighteen months of work, unemployment, Buddhism and Boulby Mine, and you’ll see the world with his ‘glittering eye’. Bob Beagrie writes: ‘These unadorned, understated poems move effortlessly between inner and outer landscapes, pinpointing moments of crisis, conflict, sadness, resignation and hope with sardonic wit and a real eye for detail. They shine with the same resolute authenticity you find in the poems of Raymond Carver and Fred Voss.'

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In 2003 Middlesbrough was officially 150 years old. To celebrate the 150th anniversary of the town's Charter of Incorporation, Andy Croft was commissioned to write an historical pageant telling the history of the town. The result is Smoke! Part play, part poem, part musical, part history-lesson, Smoke! tells the story of the wild-west frontier-town that became Gladstone's Infant Hercules. It's a story about Industry and Nature, Men and Women, Change and Continuity, the Past and the Future. And a lot of smoke.

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Gary Ming is an ex-brick layer, an ex-steel-erector, an ex-junkie and an ex-con. Give It A Try deals with difficult subjects and painful feelings - drugs, prison, death, guilt, love and despair. By turns bitter and tender, cynical and lyrical, these poems are an unflinching record of one man's discovery of the redemptive power of poetry. Go on - give it a try.

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The first of the River Tales series. A dark, gothic tale about the Tees and the people that made their living from it. Based on true events, the story, by Norman Cowell, has been developed into a limited edition artist’s bookwork by Teesside based arts collective Heterogloss.

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Katharine Banner lived and worked on a dairy farm in North Yorkshire from 1985 for about twenty years. Her poetry is full of unpredictable weather, ancient farm machinery, magic, sex and death, the harshness - and the weirdness - of the natural world.

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This is poetry that speaks from deep inside, that moves the reader, touching dulled sensibilities. Syndou Diarrassouba has created poems that express his desolation at having to flee from Liberia, his affection for his welcome in the North East and his spiritual faith in the future. There is an instinctive lyricism and lovely play with the words of a newly learned language. These poems' emotional literacy speak with wisdom gleaned from years of stress and suffering, as well as revealing the poignant sense of insecurity that comes with a deportation order.

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A substantial new collection from this powerful North Yorkshire writer. Includes many prize-winning poems, which delve into astronomy, childhood terrors, the fabulous, the amatory, the fishy, the hospital, disappearing communities. Pat Borthwick gets at the truth, brings out its light and dark in every detail.

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The second issue from the River Tales series.

Four stories from the Tees by Garry Newmarch: 'Find the Missing Tallymen', 'A Cut Above the Rest', 'Too Much Well Altogether, Sir', and 'The Loss of the (nearly) Good Ship "W*ttenb*rg".' Newmarch’s droll accounts of incidents in the life of a Customs & Excise officer build a vivid and comic picture of life on the Riverside in the seventies.

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It would be hard to find poetry like this down South. This is very much northern poetry in its best sense - aware of inequalities and of humble beauty, expressed with a wry awareness; poems written with tender, self-mocking observations of motorway sidings, miners in clubs, a thrush fallen out of its next too early and a lost love.

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This is Andy Willoughby's first collection, produced whilst the fourth Middlesbrough Poet Laureate. Hailing from Grangetown, he is co-director of Hydrogen Jukebox at Darlington and known for his work as freelance poet, playwright and performer of the spoken word. Readers will find here Willoughby's powerful performance pieces, popular football poems and a range
of work with an authentic Teesside voice, lilting from the back streets of the post-industrial landscape to a dying fall over Eston Hills.

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This is Geoff Strange's first collection. Living and working in Cleveland since 1978, he's been developing as a poet since he joined a Middlesbrough adult education class in 1999. In 2002 he won the North Yorks National Park Open Poetry Prize and his poem was used to promote National Parks throughout the country. Strange is a writer who is truly in touch with nature and the landscapes around him. These poems celebrate the beauty of his adopted land.

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These brilliant and original stories, Tara Bergin’s first collection, were composed from notes and observations made in the streets, the metro and the train stations of St. Petersburg.

'Small is not only beautiful but also powerful, as these exquisite and sensitive stories prove' - Sara Maitland

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Fifteen Tees Valley writers explore the psychological as well as the geographical landscape, those dark recesses of the mind where secrets lie hidden.  An eclectic and exciting mix of writing selected by novelist Chrissie Glazebrook on the theme of ‘a sense of place’. Authors include Bob Beagrie, Norah Hill, Tara Bergin, Linda Innes, Diane Cockburn, Pauline Plummer.

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Gold is just that. Jo Heather’s poetry takes the precious metal of love, grief and remembrance and works it into shapes and songs that will endure, be admired and offer consolation.


A difficult journey through love and loss, made in poems all the more moving for their restraint.

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These poems by Ian Horn  escape and travel far and wide but pull back to family and home roots. A dry Durham take on the good and bad times.


'Ian Horn has made what he calls the Billy Elliot territory of East Durham his own. Born and bred in the coalfield, son of a miner, he has the authentic understated voice that is subversively witty. Beneath the charm there is conflict between escapism and local pride. His word plays and pithy asides laugh at the passions in a way that pays homage, in the jester tradition of Chaucer and Cervantes. The Singing Ducks is an excellent companion to any journey. Quack on.'

S. J. Litherland

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Available early March 2008.

An exciting anthology of poems from 23 of the region's poets written in response to a variety of work in the permanent collection of mima, the new Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art. Selected and edited by Colette Bryce with full-colour plates of the art works.

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By turns inventive and obsessive, Rain in a Dry Land documents the end of one love and the beginning of another, while a disenchantment with the rainy North contrasts with the sickness of the self exiled. Most of all, these poems describe and hold true to moments of magic when anything familiar is, like rain in a dry land, a blessing from an empty sky.

‘Spark's writing is tender, angry and wonderfully observational.’

Ian McMillan

‘Spark has a style and a poetic instinct that are second to none. He is a poet who deserves  to be lauded as one of the best in Britain today.
                                                 
The Black Mountain Review

'The edge he manages to achieve is sharp. There is a tough, one might say North Eastern, realism at work here....This collection ... has grit and determination....It deserves to be read.'

Other Poetry III.3

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With present gulls and past explorers, Janice Sinson’s poems make their voyages out from Whitby into family memories and nightmares, travels in other lands, revelations from medical interventions, art gallery, on the water and on the net. And the daily livings of nesting gulls. Poems that hover with wit and compassion by the cliff-edges of land and life.

Lively and sensuous poems that celebrate language, fragility and all things human.

Jo Shapcott

There is a fierce, hard-won quality to these terse lyrics, their affirmations all the stronger for being made in the face of some of the darkest episodes in human history. Perhaps that very history is what makes Janice Sinson seem one of Alvarez’s survivor poets, her dry humour more akin to the Eastern Europeans we read in translation than to anything in the English tradition.

Roger Garfitt

Much to admire in this collection

Other Poetry III.3

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‘See Britain!’ jokes the sophisticated stewardess to a young boy from rural Pakistan catching the English winter and its first fever on the plane’s steps. Khadim Hussain’s poems chart the highs and lows of countless such arrivals: dreams of prosperity that wake to mixed realities; memories of home irretrievable from time’s blank floods. He captures changing perspectives with bittersweet tenderness and wit, with inventive and revealing shifts of diction, rhythm and tone.

Hussain draws impressively on his historical knowledge and deep roots in the Asian community and, sometimes with a  humorous flourish, sometimes with a profoundly moving vision, contemplates past, childhood and tradition in Pakistan and confronts realities and identity in modern Britain.
 
Andy Willoughby, Teesside poet and editor with Ek Zuban.


Khadim Hussain’s work carries all the ins and outs of Asian culture and heritage and will be read by all with a lot of interest. He is so much more than a local writer and is worthy of wide renown.

Hazrat Shah, Urdu poet and editor with Aaina and Tadeeb International

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WILD is a beautiful book by environmentalist Mike Pratt. Mudfog Press is delighted to publish these explorations in prose and sketches of  the author’s encounters with animals, birds and the landscape of the North East over several decades. This is energetic and poetic writing infused with a love of nature and deep spirituality.

Mike Pratt is the Chief Executive Office of the Northumberland Wildlife Trust and a teacher of Tai Chi.

Chris Baines, environmental broadcaster and author, wrote that there are accounts here of spectacular and unusual wildlife,  but that the book is mainly about ‘the familiar and the commonplace – wildlife at a neighbourhood scale – and for that reason more than any other, it is of direct relevance to each and every one of us.’

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Seven short stories by five Tees Valley writers. Sharply observed, often quirky, ranging from dark humour to broken romance, these stories offer an intermingling of narrative for the early 21st. century. Marion Husband's selection from these five writers, all mentored by experienced professional authors, touches on childhood and old age, moves from Redcar to the Red Sea, involves teddy bears and untamed dogs, and reflects on piracy, terrorism and tourism.

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'Monica Sharp's gift is to focus in on just the right detail to bring alive a memory, a place or a person. Her poems are full of characters, closely observed and captured with humour and affection. She shows us the everyday reality of ordinary lives and makes it special. There is a quiet poignancy in her recollections: in vividly caught moments she recreates times past and loss. The poems celebrate relationships; leave the reader with a strong sense of the poet's optimism and warmth.' - Cynthia Fuller

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'Natalie Scott's poems touch me in all the right places: the head, the heart and the ear. She has a lovely lightness of touch and quirkiness of phrase whether voicing the thoughts of a giraffe, a boulder or the Pancake Woman. She handles her subject matter with compassion, intelligence and that indefinable something extra which makes Brushed a memorable and persuasive debut.' - Anna Woodford

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One of Many Knots is a brilliant first collection by Katie Metcalfe. Katie's poems are both highly personal, charting, in her own words, 'real experiences that defined years of my life' and universal in their ability to distil heartache, wonder, anger and joy. Katie's poems capture the fantastical among the seemingly mundane, the humour amongest the horror, in an invigorating, evocative collection.

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"With echoes of 'Under Milkwood', 'Coal Dust Whispers Song' conjures the voices of the living and the dead..."  Bob Beagrie

"Many books have been written about the Durham coalfield. But whereas most have told the story of the miners and their struggles to win the coal, the fights against the coal-owners, governemnt and police, Alison Carr is interested in remembering the life of the miner's wife.....She writes with remarkable lyrical intensity about a life repeatedly shaped by 'poverty and loss' and by the men-folk - father, husband, son and grandson - 'whose adventures were another name for trouble.' An extraordinarily powerful piece of writing."  Andy Croft

"Alison Carr has a very original vision and a unique way with words. She writes with passion and commitment and has something to tell us all."   Wendy Robertson

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"At last, - a collection of poems by Tom Richardson! I can think of no other poet who could bring Schubert, Abu Ghraib and Senlac Hill together with such care and precision. These are 'taut-stretched' texts, 'flinty' and 'skeletal', alive to the history of language and the language of History, balancing between despair and dreaming, hope and defiance."
 Andy Croft

"These spare yet rich poems  'know about hope and defiance'. Like the controlled horse, they ripple with rage, disappointment, wonder, joy, in the quiet conviction that freedom, although constrained, is not only desirable, but possible." 
Marilyn Longstaff

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Felicity's love of Swaledale shines out in these pellucid and lyrical poems. With sensitive observation and a musician's ear, she draws us in to the life and landscape around her. She captures the moods of the river and of the hills, their fierceness and beauty, as we are led through the seasons. But far from being simply an observer, she shares the life of the Dale in all its toughness. She celebrates above all the constancy that underpins change.

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'Jan McBride's stories excavate families and relationships: a rich source to mine. But she works with a scalpel not a shovel and often catches the reader unawares. Be prepared for emotional shocks and surprises.' 
- Kitty Fitzgerald

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For ten years Bob Beagrie and Andy Willoughby have worked together as writers on a wide range of youth and community projects using creative writing and drama as a means of engagement, often with difficult and hard to reach groups, with the results frequently used as models of good practice. This collection of poems draws on their experience of young people and connects to their use of silent film, particularly to Charles Chaplin's 1921 classic 'The Kid', as a means of inspiration and engagement. The most reluctant participants have responded strongly to the iconic image of the little tramp and this collection and their live show, performed at Turku European City of Culture 2011, interrogates the enduring resonance of Chaplin's work and begs the question 'What's changed for kids on the edge of society in the last hundred years?'

"Kids is much, much more than a celebration of Chaplin's work; it demonstrates the relevance and impact his films have on some of the most disadvantaged young people  living in the North East of England." Annabel Turpin, Director of Arc, Stockton on Tees.

"Kids is an essential and powerful read, a collection that truly matters and should be posted on every facebook, twitter and blog. Bob Beagrie and Andy Willoughby have done us proud in reminding us of our collective responsibilities." Tom Kelly

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Mel McEvoy's poetry begins deep wthin his heart. He is able to draw from the well which is his memory and create poems which touch every person who reads them.

Lavonne Westbrook, editor for Poetrycircle.com

This is Mel McEvoy's first collection. His poems sharply reflect the rural Ireland of the 1950s shown through the heartbreaking lives of his parents. It also explores the hardships of their lives as immigrants in Liverpool in teh 60s and 70s. His poems achieve a rare feat: they are narratives of feeling.

Pauline Plummer

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This is a poet you won't find in any port, although he has been in the Royal Navy and Merchant Navy for much of his working life. His life has been uncompromisingly tough, weathering storms in the Indian Ocean, surviving alcohol addiction, watching innocent people die of starvation because there were too many needing help. It could have made him hard. But he turned to lyricism, the language of poetry, to express grief, remorse and tenderness: he found the right words. Not the plain talk of an Old Salt, more the glimmering spellbinding memorable phrases of Coleridge's Ancient Mariner.

S.J.Litherland

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