Tough is the bitter-sweet taste of urban romanticism, barbecued bear and the bright lights of Grangetown, from the biggest mouth on Teesside. Poet Andy Willoughby goes back to the estates where you have to be tough to survive. Sometimes he acts tough, sometimes he talks tough. Sometimes he is not so tough after all. Tough is his first full-length collection. If you don't like it - tough.
"...a poetical manifesto chronicling the hopes, fears, rituals, traditions and metamorphoses of a people proud of past achievements and apprehensive of future prospects, shot through with... wit, audacity and inventiveness."
Socialist Review
"These poems often breathe a humility and tenderness that belies the title."
Dreamcatcher
"Andy Willoughby is a power-house of creative energy, a renegade poet, a traveller, a performer, a ranter, a modern day shaman. His poems bring to life the hard-edged facts of life, loss and love ; digging beneath the surface and drawing out the mythic and the epic qualities of everyday experience, to turn them on their heads."
Bob Beagrie
"Andy Willoughby touches the political, and social, and with the precision of a surgeon flips it on its back, to expose the heartbeat inside. Poetry at its most honest, that fills you with a stillness and sadness at the intake of breath before every F word, at each microcosm carved of stone."
Angela Readman
"Tough like meat. Not much gristle on these bones. Andy Willoughby is one of the meatiest poets I know, as loud on the page as on the stage."
Kevin Cadwallender
Andy Willoughby comes from Eston, the old iron-stone mining area of Middlesbrough. He runs Ek Zuban publishers and the Hydrogen Jukebox Cabaret in Darlington. Recently appointed Middlesbrough's Poet Laureate, he is currently writer-in-residence at the University of Teesside.
(for Nana)
Your clock was wrong for twenty years but you never replaced it. You've stopped now too, like the old song never to go again, your time all wrong at the end - not knowing the day or the hour, who visited you, reminded every ten minutes, facts promptly forgotten, ticker not tocking properly, blood in the brain too slow. Your old black piano out of tune and un-played, gathering dust. Going out of time, morphine confusion of lung cancer shadows, your strange pronouncements, ambiguous in their nonsense and mythic response, our books of Greek legends all infested with paper lice, your mother forgot to dip your memory in the black river waters, you told me I was a bloody fool on that death bed, it's true but I don't know why you said it: my cap and bells invisibly jangling as I walk away from the familiar Merlin Road door the day of your funeral, away from the nicotine stained curtains and yellow plastic daffodils dustily brightening up the Boyd's Estate sitting room for forty years, away from the ghostly laughs of aunts, uncles, sisters, cousins, from the Star Trek signature tune on the old brown T.V. you and I watched so avidly. Away from the echo of my own child-voice in its uncaged imaginings. The last thing you said to me was "What else is there?" in a seemingly lucid moment but it was hospital dinner-time and whether you were calling for dessert or contemplating the end of breathing I'll never be sure - "daft bugger", you laugh in your eternal cloud of Embassy smoke. Eternity or custard? - as good an epitaph as any.
Tough, by Andy Willoughby
£5.99
Poetry, 78pp
Publication date: 1st July 2005
ISBN 0-9548691-5-X
Order Tough from Inpress.
