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 Bronts, 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