The Works

Maureen Almond

£6.99 paperback
ISBN 978-1-903914-14-4

In the fifty-two poems which make up The Works, Maureen Almond presents a distinctive poetic voice which is at once earthy, poignant, witty and learned. Here she brings alive the colourful world of working-class Teesside, reflecting on the ebullient and embattled working-class community in which she grew up, dominated by now long-vanished heavy industry and by the daily struggle for status and survival. The landscape of Trafalgar Street, its pubs, chip-shops and dance-halls, its characters and cries, hard men, feisty women, adolescent agonies and children's quarrels are vividly evoked in this memorable series of poems, which range in tone from forceful satire to elegiac lament but show a constant warm-heartedness and sensitivity of thought.

"Particularly impressive is her incorporation into this environment of a complete new version of Horace's Epodes, showing that this two-thousand-year-old collection of poems of attack, friendship, humour, love, witchcraft and politics can provide effective parallels and fertile literary material for our own time. Horace's poetry-book, amongst the most bizarre and variegated of Latin works, is relocated in telling detail and with triumphant success from first-century B.C. Rome to a similarly rough, passionate and precarious environment, giving a classical text a major new life through a surging transfusion of poetic and cultural energy."

Dr Stephen Harrison, Corpus Christi College, Oxford

"This is a hugely enjoyable sequence - brave, touching and real, making a place and a people really come alive. In places it reminds me of some of the best poems in Douglas Dunn's Terry Street, especially the way Maureen Almond tiptoes carefully between the temptations of nostalgia and photographic realism. Her use of Horace is fantastic. She writes her characters without their becoming either caricatures or soap-characters or sentimental monsters. She unfreezes the picture so that Billy and Aggie and the rest have a life beyond the time and the place in which they first appear. This sequence of poems makes a very strong collection."

Andy Croft