The Nightside of Sunderland (extract)
Sunday Morning in the Lanes On Sunday morning we turned out as the bells of Sunderland Church were ringing and crowds of well dressed people were proceeding to their several places of worship. The...
View ArticleStreets of Tyne
I kicked out in Half Moon Yard, bucked a rotten system. Fell out with fools in All Hallows Lane and grew up feeling loved. She dragged my hand down Rabbit Banks Road, there seemed nowhere else to take...
View ArticleCoastal Town, Cold Sunday Night
I imagine ice shocked watery death On saw blade breakers lit lurid Neon orange by the street lamps. The architecture joins me, depressed Closed nightclubs next to empty hotels, Tacky 42nd Street, fake...
View ArticleThe question of naming it
Why not this city with its seven bridges and its bricked-in buddleias nodding from crevices, and its raucous colonies of visiting seabirds? Why not, on this street that leads to the sea, in this dusty...
View ArticleRolling down the river…
Walking past British Engines again, early and before the summer sun rises, through the plastic flaps that cover the doorways forklifts come and go. Through the open windows the machines hum...
View ArticleTracking the Tramp
(From ‘The Kid’) Bitter breeze on the back of my neck. It’ll be a cold night out on the streets. Northern cities are unforgiving places for anyone without a nest. How quickly they strip you down thin...
View ArticleConsulting Barry’s Chapbooks in Newcastle Library Local Studies
Without wit, halfday his wean was, without WORSWICK. Cooked, called by cardindex, CARLIOL-commuter-carer can’t copy. MARKET me if I’m minded on MacSweeney pores pan of peasy. Parks, proximal,...
View ArticleA Night in Morden Tower
“Leonardo criticized the painters, who, as he put it, ‘want even the slightest trace of charcoal to remain valid’, and asked them: Have you never thought about how poets compose their verse? They never...
View ArticleAfter Breakfast (With Peter) Costing 5/6d.
a girl in a hooped miniskirt leans against the white door of the CLOTH MARKET CAFE it is 10.30 a.m. here are cabbages jewish artichokes granny pippins & button mushrooms its so sunny. i spat blood...
View ArticleIntroduction
Barry MacSweeney was a wanderer, an outsider, a poète maudit with a magpie mind. He was born in Benwell, one of the most underprivileged areas of Newcastle upon Tyne, England on July 17th 1948. He died...
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