All books

I close my eyes and see poems
written inside my head.
I open them to copy them down.
Through photos I see
the poems with my eyes open.
These are the translations and
transcriptions of what I see.

“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 Brontës, a foreboding proximity to
the Yorkshire Ripper, or celebrations of absent
friends. Channelling infl uences such as Geoff rey
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.”

“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.”

“It’s rare to find a poet so brilliantly dexterous with
language… In Caldebroc, the reader travels across time
and history – from the Brontës’ Haworth, to Icelandic sagas
and global financial meltdown. Rowland constantly revives
poetic language and,in doing so, uses the full artistic
palette. The effect is both ecstatic and celebratory.”