Year I Loved England

Joseph Horgan - was born in Birmingham, England, of Irish parents. He is a poet, author, journalist, and reviewer. His writings and poems have appeared in numerous literary journals in Ireland, the UK, Europe and America and have been broadcast on television and radio. He is a past winner of The Patrick Kavanagh Award and has been short-listed for a Hennessy Award. He has released three books, a CD of poetry and traditional music and was chosen for the Poetry Ireland Introduction Series. His journalism has appeared in Ireland and the UK, in the Irish Left Review, the Press Gazette and the Irish Post. He has written a weekly column for the Irish Post since 1999. Antony Owen - is from Coventry, England. His manuscript The Dreaded Boy was chosen to launch Pighog Publishing's 'Passport' pamphlet series. Poems from The Dreaded Boy were filmed and featured in the officially authorised and updated musical dramatisation of The Wall by Pink Floyd in 2012. In 2012 his exhibition of poetry and photography featured at Coventry Cathedral, and in 2013 the exhibition was accepted for the Hiroshima Peace Museum. His first collection My Father's Eyes Were Blue was published by The Heaventree Press in 2009.

• A series of poems with each page loosely representing the story of each inhabitant on a street.

By author Anthony Cartright This powerful collection offers a vision of the middle of England. This is in direct contrast to the Middle England the mainstream political parties and media have made so much noise about for a generation. "My city lost its voice today," goes a line in Coventry Street. Joseph Horgan and Antony Owen's poems seek to regain that voice in some sense: a voice that is layered, elegiac, plural, and clear-sighted about the pain that much of this country is forced to endure while others look on. There is much pain in these poems, and a desire to escape from that pain, "people in the sky are falling up" says the opening poem Address, which turns a midlands street into a Chagall dreamscape. "Tonight I'll walk you home to the sky - wish upon stars of a 747" says The Dreamer of Samuel Vale House. For all the dreams of weightlessness, though, "anchors to childhood are heavy/sometimes they drown us" explains the The Little Things Destroy Us. And so they do. And the big things too - economic catastrophe, family history, race, migration, war, the accidents of geography - as these poems show us. The childhood anchors in question come from the 1980s, the decade in which much of the West Midlands, and the rest of the country's industrial areas, were turned to ruin. Thatcher appears once, she glides "by in a Daimler", a car made, of course, in the Coventry she attempts to destroy. But the roots are deep, Churchill is here also, an architect of a "city made by flames"; "what will you weave for Dresden from Coventry's stone elbows?" asks the poem Fat Man. These are voices of England aligned with the powerless on all fronts. In the beautiful title poem, " - a man left the house/and returned unmade from the smokeless factory." From Samuel Vale House today we watch, "bored kids re-open the factory/admire their work where there is none. This loss is the anchor which drowns people in these poems, the landscape too, "hills had their backs broken" explains Ghost Town, a poem that echoes The Specials' lament, and, with its haiku stanzas, references the Coventry Nissan plant, and a new economic world order. And yet the drowned voices are here. We hear them throughout this collection, which is one of the reasons it is important, The Dreamer of Samuel Vale House or the narrator who tells us "at the back of my house there are wild dogs" in Compline. This voice also tells us "I'll wait for partisans", and it is in this sense of defiance and endurance that some hint of redemption comes. "I still have hope between my teeth," we are told in Place. The Year I Loved England is rooted in place. The damaged terrain and the battered emotions become one, "a map of everything there's ever been" says The Curve of Chaos. This moving collection also offers some answers to its own complex, layered question, "Where is here anyway?", with answers that are both sensitive and vivid, in the voices of an England that it seems too many people have decided is too hard to love.