Ginnel

The United Kingdom is sometimes less united than it appears especially between North and South. The North is characterised by mills and mines, the decline of industry, cold and `Coronation Street'. The South is middle class homes, counties and the Thames, yuppies and London. Northerners think Southerners soft, Southerners think Northerners uncivilised. All of these are generalisations that ignore the world class universities of Manchester and Leeds and the rampant unemployment and crime in London and Brighton. Lucy Newlyn straddles both worlds - she grew up in Leeds and now lives and works in Oxford.

`Ginnel' is the Northern England dialect word for a passage between houses, and this closely unified sequence of poems is set in and around the ginnels of Leeds, where Lucy Newlyn grew up in the 1960s. Exploring the hinterlands of middle-class Headingley and working-class Meanwood, the sequence is pervaded by a sense of restlessness, of wandering between two worlds and times. Poems are constantly on the move, revisiting the places of childhood and childhood as a place. With acute particularity, they recall familiar sights and sounds, local people, favourite walks, dialect words learnt when playing out in the back streets. Just as ginnels intimately criss-cross the geographical terrain of Leeds, so they track the deepening of consciousness. This is poetry of firm local attachment, overlaid by a child's developing awareness of class divisions, separation, mortality and loss. The adult looks back, with a sense of exile.