Ginnel by Lucy Newlyn

Ginnel by Lucy Newlyn

'Ginnel' is the Northern 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.

'The bucolic flavour of a 1960s childhood spent haunting woods and stone-walled paths off the beaten track are captured vividly in Lucy Newlyn's first volume of poetryThe 49 pieces in Ginnel capture and celebrate the light and shade of playing with friends, watching women hang out the washing, windswept outings to Otley Chevin, and the desolate separation as friendships foundered on the divisions wrought by the 11-Plus.' - The Yorkshire Post. '...something impressive has been achieved: the depiction, piece by piece, of a whole childhood, neighbourhood, vanishing way of life...Newlyn's is a careful, humble poetry that does not overreach nor shrilly demand its readers' attention; perhaps for this reason more than any other, it ought to receive it.' - Tower Poetry.

LUCY NEWLYN is Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St Edmund Hall. She has published widely on English Romantic literature, including three books with Oxford University Press, and the Cambridge Companion to Coleridge. Her book Reading, Writing and Romanticism: The Anxiety of Reception (Oxford University Press, 2000) won the British Academy?s Rose Mary Crawshay Prize in 2001. Married with a daughter and two step-children, she lives in Oxford. This is her first collection of poems.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781903039748
ISBN 10	1903039746
Title	Ginnel
Author	Lucy Newlyn
Series	Oxford Poets Ser
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Carcanet Press Ltd
Year published	2005-05-26
Number of pages	64
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.