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Fiftieth Anniversary Edition "Gunslinger is a fundamental American masterpiece."---Thomas McGuane This fiftieth anniversary edition commemorates Edward Dorn’s masterpiece, Gunslinger, a comic, anti-epic critique of American capitalism that still resonates today. Set in the American West, the Gunslinger, his talking horse Claude Lévi-Strauss, a saloon madam named Lil, and the narrator called “I” set out in search of the billionaire Howard Hughes. As they travel along the Rio Grande to Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, and finally on to Colorado, they are joined by a whole host of colorful characters: Dr. Jean Flamboyant, Kool Everything, and Taco Desoxin and his partner Tonto Pronto. ...
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Grainger Town is as much an idea as it is a place. It is an important phenomenon, both historically and in today's debate about conservation in our cities and towns. Richard Grainger, a native of Newcastle and a builder and speculator unparalleled in the region, in the middle decades of the 19th century co-ordinated a radical re-planning that turned the town of his birth from an already handsome regional capital to one which excited the admiration of visitors from far and wide. Grainger's particular achievement was to create a new commercial and residential heart within a historic town, a heart with consistent architectural quality starkly different from the piecemeal and eclectic character of most northern industrial cities. This book describes the evolution of the area and explains how recent planning initiatives have celebrated and exploited a unique urban landscape and injected new life into it.
Tom Pickard's Ballad of Jamie Allan recounts the true adventures of an eighteenth-century gypsy musician who lived on the English?Scottish Borders and died in Durham jail, serving a life sentence for stealing a horse. Though once patronized by dukes and earls, Allan lost their support as his wayward behavior began to exceed their own. His reputation as a great piper was matched only by his reputation as an outlaw or, in the words of Walter Scott, "a desperate reprobate."Drawing on newspaper accounts and court depositions, Pickard brings the ballad tradition to life with his own genius for the form. Through the words of his cohorts and contemporaries, Allan emerges as a spirit of the Borders, that wild and historically lawless region where rivers and fells set the stage for his captures and escapes.
Winter Migrants opens with Tom Pickard's prize-winning sequence 'Lark & Merlin', an erotic pursuit over the hills and fells of the poet's Northern-English homeland. Stotting clough and gill in sneaping winds, leaping burns by backlit larches, waves of sleek grass skiffing mist ... here, says the poet, 'the weather is overseer'. The borders between body and landscape, desire and object, blur in the mammal heat of pursuit, of a lover, of a self, insatiable and unresolvable. There follows a selection from the Fiends Fell Journals, a haibun or poetry-diary, composed over the decade Pickard lived alone on the wind-blown North Pennines. Short poems dedicated to friends and acerbic, satirical poems...
Land of Three Rivers is a celebration of North-East England in poetry, featuring its places and people, culture, history, language and stories in poems and songs with both rural and urban settings. Taking its bearings from the Tyne, Wear and Tees of the title (from Vin Garbutt's song 'John North'), the book maps the region in poems relating to past and present, depicting life from Roman times through medieval Northumbria and the industrial era of mining and shipbuilding up to the present-day. The anthology has modern perspectives on historical subjects, such as W.H. Auden's 'Roman Wall Blues' and Alistair Elliot on the aftermath of the Battle of Heavenfield in the 7th century, as well as poe...