
Ickerbrow Trig
Michael Haslam(Author)
Shearsman Books (Publisher)
Published on 10. January 2020
Book
Paperback/Softback
118 pages
978-1-84861-697-4 (ISBN)
Description
Ickerbrow Trig, the book, is simply a collection of poems written since A Cure for Woodness. As for the book's title, it's simply the remnant of a bonnet-bee and an exhausted pun. As a topographical feature, it exists, un-named as such on any map, though Ickerbrow is better known to followers of the Ordnance Survey as High Brown Knoll [it's the knoll that's turned the brow brown].
"In Michael Haslam we have a genuine major poet of the north of England" -David Wheatley, The Literary Review, on Scaplings
"On each of these pages Michael Haslam sets out (on foot) into the world immediately confronting him, and gathers from it the words, experience, memories, percepts... that he needs to form a poetry of rich texture. He does this singingly, so that the words echo each other and form queues, and with the sharpest awareness of all the bright play offered by language when it is opened up, when it faces its own history. The accumulation, constantly seeking closer particulars and further connections, welcomes dialect and science, the meanings of place names, star jelly and deoxyribonucleic acid, as necessary terms of the song, which is finally the song of where he is, which is the Calder Valley, West Yorkshire, and the world, the absolute gained by loving attention to the particular."
-Peter Riley
"In Michael Haslam we have a genuine major poet of the north of England" -David Wheatley, The Literary Review, on Scaplings
"On each of these pages Michael Haslam sets out (on foot) into the world immediately confronting him, and gathers from it the words, experience, memories, percepts... that he needs to form a poetry of rich texture. He does this singingly, so that the words echo each other and form queues, and with the sharpest awareness of all the bright play offered by language when it is opened up, when it faces its own history. The accumulation, constantly seeking closer particulars and further connections, welcomes dialect and science, the meanings of place names, star jelly and deoxyribonucleic acid, as necessary terms of the song, which is finally the song of where he is, which is the Calder Valley, West Yorkshire, and the world, the absolute gained by loving attention to the particular."
-Peter Riley
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Exeter
United Kingdom
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 7 mm
Weight
184 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-84861-697-4 (9781848616974)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Michael Haslam was born in Bolton, Lancashire in 1947, and educated at Bolton School and Peterhouse, Cambridge. In his final year (1968) he took tutorials with J.H. Prynne in Caius. He began publishing his poetry in 1971, after Peter Riley had duplicated and distributed a number of copies of his poems to editors of little magazines. In 1970 he came to live at Foster Clough, near Hebden Bridge, where he still lives. By the late 1970s merely living there had become his sole poetic subject. His poetry to date has been collected in Mid-Life (Shearsman Books, 2007), and in three volumes from Arc Publications.