Town-boy meets Square-boy. The inner-city meets the suburbs. Town is an exploration of the conflicting mentalities of the country and the city. It's a compelling tale of love, ambition and class. It's a study in English suburban misery and an indictment of a divisive education system. It's an epic poem about failure in loving, failure in living.
"courageous, exciting and challenging"
Adrian Mitchell
"a dark work which unflinchingly confronts the threat to our essential humanity posed by the society in which we live. Dent's language crackles with the rugged energy of the Anglo-Saxon scop, his unrhymed and largely unpunctuated verse heavily alliterative, dense and powerful... In our sound-bite culture, it is refreshing to read such a passionate, committed, yet controlled epic."
Oz Hardwick, Aesthetica
"brave, unflinching and true"
Fred Voss
"the voice of the concerned man adrift a hostile world"
Jim Burns
"subtle intelligence in every line... every word counts"
John Murray
"risk-taking excitement, with a sense of verbal energy"
Alexis Lykiard
Alan Dent was born in Preston in 1951. He still lives there and teaches modern languages in a local comprehensive school. His previous books of poetry are Bedtime Story, Antidotes to Optimism, Corker and Who. Since 1995 he has edited the radical literary magazine Penniless Press, and he is the editor of the Smokestack anthology, When The Metro Is Free. He is married with two children.
