Smokestack Books: Imagined Corners by Keith Armstrong

Imagined Corners: Keith Armstrong

For over thirty years Keith Armstrong has been taking his poetry to what John Donne called "the round earth's imagined corners" - giving poetry readings in the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Poland, Iceland, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Spain, Sweden, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, the United States, Jamaica, Kenya and Cuba. At the same time he has been exploring some of the imagined corners of his native North East of England, its sometimes heroic past and its post-industrial discontents.

Imagined Corners brings together, for the first time, poems from all the corners of Keith Armstrong's imagination. It's a trumpet call to those who, in the words of John Donne, are the victims of:

"war, dearth, age, agues, tyrannies,
Despair, law."

It is a manifesto for the public ownership of poetry. It's a hymn to a broken internationalism. And it's a beery love-poem for the North East.

"There are those who tell the terrible truth in all its loveliness. Keith Armstrong is one of them, a fine poet who refuses to turn his back on the wretched of the Earth. He is one of the best and I hope his voice will be heard more and more widely."

Adrian Mitchell

"If you are old enough to remember Britain before it fell under the malicious spell of those who believe to catch a bus if you're over thirty is proof of failure, it will remind you of gentler, sweeter times... in place of the empty, near-manic, self-congratulatory but superficial and compensatory sensibility of modern culture, Armstrong gives us a sense of what we have lost, how we have gone wrong and reminds us of the dirt and darkness beneath the neon and glitz."

Penniless Press

"rooted in the Tyneside music-hall tradition, closely behind which was the august balladry of the Borders... the authentic note of the Northern poet."

Michael Standen, Other Poetry

"postcards from an alternative grand tour, journal entries from another, more innocent time, when the world spun more slowly and we had time to befriend strangers and notice things... celebrating people and places, a world of anecdote and adventure, strong drink and life itself."

Paul Summers, Dreamcatcher

Keith Armstrong has worked as a community-arts development worker, poet, librarian and publisher. A founder of Ostrich magazine, Poetry North East, Tyneside Writers' Workshop, Tyneside Poets, East Durham Writers' Workshop, Tyneside Trade Unionists for Socialist Arts, Tyneside Street Press and the Strong Words and Durham Voices community publishing series, he has been poet-in-residence in Durham, Easington, Sedgefield, Derwentside, Teesdale, Wear Valley, Chester-le-Street, Sunderland and the Hexham Races. He lives in Whitley Bay.

His publications include Pains Of Class, Dreaming North, The Jinglin' Geordie, The Darkness Seeping, Poets' Voices, The Big Meeting: A People's View of the Durham Miners' Gala, The Town of Old Hexham, Old Dog On The Isle Of Woman and Bless'd Millennium: The Life & Work Of Thomas Spence. His music-theatre collaborations include O'er the Hills (Dreaming North), Wor Jackie (Northumberland Theatre Company), Pig's Meat (Bruvvers Theatre Company) and The Roker Roar (Monkwearmouth Youth Theatre Company). Several of his songs have been recorded by Durham indie-folk-punk band The Whisky Priests.