"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 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
