Keith Howden
was born near Burnley in 1932. He is married, with three children.
After National Service and work as a laboratory assistant, he taught
English and modern European fiction with a major interest in 'the
text as event' at Nottingham Trent University. Among his many poetry
pamphlets are Joe Anderson, Daft Jack's Ideal Republics, Pauper
Grave, Hanging Alice Nutter and Barlow Agonistes. He has
published three full-length collections, Marches of Familiar
Landscape (Peterloo 1978), Onkonkay (Peterloo (1984) and
Jolly Roger (Smokestack 2012). Recently, with his son, the
composer Matthew Howden, he has completed two poetry music
collaborations, with accompanying discs: The Matter of Britain
(PRE Rome 2009) and Barley Top (Redroom 2013).
This is the ‘strewn and bitter’ landscape of
the Pennine margins. It haunts the poet’s imagination, the covert
agonies of a small, remembered world where the encompassing moors
narrow not only physical horizons.The result is less kaleidoscopic
than holographic: a disembodied, three dimensional image is
projected, as indubitable as it is implausible. The product is a
controlled explosion which threatens to break up the smooth and
banal surface of diurnal appearance and lay open its components. It
is a disturbing effect’ (Fraser Steele,
Poetry Now, Radio3)
These ‘stabbed and broken memories,’ intended
as an oracle of ‘the fierce morality of punctured life’ are also a
threnody for ‘time not innocent from time not innocent.’ Perhaps
such matters cannot any longer be left to scientist, sociologist and
cartographer. This book may be read as a powerful novel…such a book
comes from a poet whose further work will be looked forward to. (Ann
Tibble, Poetry Review.)
It is rare these days to find really long poems and even rarer to
find long poems of quality…All the poems make
compulsive reading with images that stick in the memory/. A
most impressive book. I’d like to read a lot more like this.
(Jim Mangall, Ambit)
Here is paradox. Keith Howden’s addiction to
an agnostic stance comes of no passive or supine despair, but of an
impassioned love of his place, the moors ‘flayed by quarrying’ the
streets that wear ‘no memory longer than yesterday’s fag’, which
prevents him from confining it in easy definitions. Like the
landscape he writes of, the diction and form of his verse are
deceptively stark and simple…but are sturdy enough to deny nostalgia
and demand a concern for the places they portray.
(Shirley Toulson,
British Book News.)
