To No Place

Peter Armstrong was born in 1957 at Blaydon-on-Tyne. After a selection of his early poetry was included in Neil Astley's anthology Ten North-East Poets (1980), his work appeared in four main collections: Risings (Enitharmon Press, 1988), The Red-funnelled Boat (Picador, 1998), The Capital of Nowhere (Picador, 2003) and The Book of Ogham (Shoestring Press, 2012), together with two pamphlets, Madame Noire (2008) and Two Ceremonies at the Border (2023), both from Shoestring Press. His 70th birhday retrospective To No Place: New & Selected Poems (Bloodxe Books, 2027) includes work from all these previous collections. He worked full-time in the NHS as a mental health nurse and CBT specialist, contributing to research papers and text books. He was joint author, with Stephen Barton of CBT for Depression: an Integrated Approach (SAGE, 2019), and is co-editor with Jake Morris-Campbell of William Martin's Marratide: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2025). He lives in Northumberland.

The poet, you feel, is a cartographer walking his own map, taking you with him on a guided tour of places and people that are almost out of touch with themselves; and on this journey, nowhere is a place you have to come to, however unsettling the view, however far from home you might feel.