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For Tom Pickard poetry is a free, and freeing, space. His pen
'demands / complete autonomy', and finds it as it explores both
harsh and lyrical realities with a northern working-class
sensibility. A lifelong counter-cultural figure, Pickard transcends
formal and thematic barriers with a lightness of touch that is
informed both by anger and by love.
Winter Migrants opens with Tom Pickard's prize-winning sequence
Lark & Merlin, an erotic pursuit over the hills and fells of
the poet's Northern-English homeland. Stotting clough and gill in
sneaping winds, leaping burns by backlit larches, waves of sleek
grass skiffing mist ...here, says the poet, 'the weather is
overseer'. The borders between body and landscape, desire and
object, blur in the mammal heat of pursuit, of a lover, of a self,
insatiable and unresolvable. There follows a selection from the
Fiends Fell Journals, a haibun or poetry-diary, composed over the
decade Pickard lived alone on the wind-blown North Pennines. Short
poems dedicated to friends and acerbic, satirical poems lend the
second half of Winter Migrants a playful warmth and tonic
mischief.As the collection draws to a close, the poems return to
the familiar horizon of Solway Firth, the estuary 'where winter
migrants gather in long black lines', and the world, cooled now
both inside and out, quells: a curlew gifts its 'estuary echo';
gulls make a 'confetti flurry' above the shoreline; and clouds,
once pale and flitting, pour purple and gold, 'a mercury whisper of
tipped-in light'.' I am an old admirer of Tom Pickard's poetry and
believe as does Basil Bunting that he is one of the most live and
true poetic voices in Great Britain.'Allen Ginsberg'Pickard uses
local words and slang authentically. [...] But throughout his work
he reaches into a need for a certain strenuous innocence, a
resistance to intellectualising, another way of speaking directly
to an audience.'Eric Mottram'In these days of technological
wizardry it might be a safe guess to say poets have become rather
thin on the ground. I mean to say that there seems to be a surplus
of estate agents, bankers, media people, technocrats, lawyers,
accountants etc...but the POET...the noble BARD appears to have
almost slipped off the map.This is one reason why I'm terribly glad
that Tom Pickard is alive and kicking, because in fact he is the
living embodiment of "poetdom". [...] To try to describe Tom's
poems would be pointless. They speak for themselves, in the most
powerful and uniquely personal way.'Annie Lennox'With sharp vision
Tom Pickard dissects his gut reaction and reminds us to appreciate
the cool clear beauty of our own situation.'Paul McCartney'the
linguistic ecstasy [...] slipped into the loneliness of the
landscape the poet finds himself answering to instead of a lover
[...] A lyric poet in profound correspondence with his home in the
Pennines and with the erotic muse.'Ange Mlinko, Poetry
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