'The
Works' was published by Biscuit Publishing, in September,
2004
‘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 crises,
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 |
