Smokestack Books: Keir Hardie Street

Keir Hardie Street: Alan Morrison

Allan Jackdaw, an unremembered early twentieth-century poet undertakes a fantastical journey on the hidden Sea-Green Line of the London Underground. Along the way he meets various shady and variously shaded characters - including the accidental capitalist Short Shanks the Shopkeeper, the scribbling Hermit of Hercules Buildings (William Blake), The Turpentine Prophet (Robert Tressell), and the Ghost of a Poet (John Davidson). When Jackdaw disembarks, he is in a secret, parallel London, a living, bustling socialist utopia. On Keir Hardie Street, the shabby figure of a baker's boy stares in awe at the pictures in a bookshop window...

In Whittington's city, 'mongst the Pillar'd Mansions
Of Wren's grand vistas and esplanades,
Another fire catching the wind ignited,
Not in Pudding Lane, but Lanarkshire,
Its touch paper smoking in the undernourished clutch
Of a baker's cadaverous delivery boy
Waylaid amid errands by sudden lightning flash
Striking him down in his tracks like Damascus:
A hoi polloi Paul on his way to St. Pancras...

"A strong, imaginative narrative which ventures into a world of Blakeian optimism, bringing his vision of Jerusalem into the present day."

Norman Buller

"In a universe full of ten-a-penny poets Alan Morrison is the genuine gold-struck and ready to be minted article. He is a poet setting off on his own unique journey; one that many will want to follow."

Gwilym Williams

"Morrison's work harks back to the pre-Thatcher social environment where some form of socialism or social transformation seemed possible and where the likes of E.P. Thompson and Raymond Williams were given their due."

Steve Spence, Stride

Alan Morrison was born in 1974. His poetry first appeared in Don't Think of Tigers (2001). He is the author of a play for voices Picaresque, and of two critically praised collections, The Mansion Gardens (2006) and A Tapestry of Absent Sitters (2009). Morrison is currently Poet-in-Residence at Mill View Psychiatric Hospital, Hove, and is the founding editor of the radical literary webzine, the Recusant.