Arnold Rattenbury
Living Here
Poetry. 1996. 70 pages. ISBN 0 904872 26 2. £6.95.

Born in China, Arnold Rattenbury has lived for some 30 years in the slate country of North Wales, Images of a mountainous, deep-valleyed terrain, its dead industries, living traditions, legends and history abound therefore. His poetry here, as in five previous volumes, is always socialist, thrusting ahead out of a long history.

'Passionately attentive to the metaphoric and analogical implications of the natural and human worlds... a very fine collection.' - Stand

'If you have never read him before this is the place to start - a wonderful, incomparable, dissident kind of post-Georgian poetry, unyielding in its intellectual rigour, its craft or its politics. Rattenbury is the last in a remarkable tradition of long-lost English communist poets . . . who looked back to Edward Thomas, and further back to William Morris, for a vision of radical England and radical English poetry.' - Scratch

'The poems, often dark and bitter, explore how capitalism has soiled the beauty of the landscape; his voice vacillates between anger and regret, but is always precise and focused.' - Chapman's

'Despite the relentlessness of these poems, each is tightly written in a mixture of free verse and rhyme, a bitterness tamed into poetry.' - PQR

Click on book for Arnold Rattenbury poem from it. |

Click here for poem for Arnold's Eightieth Birthday |

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