Overview

'Not far away, outside a lighted house.' The final collection in Ralph Dartford's 'Recovery Trilogy' sees the poet meditating on the tragic death of his beloved brother, Joseph, and how he lived in the mythical house of England: a nation of waving flags seen through soft focus sunlight. Here are his people, their misfitting tales that scratch and count the bricks of a private island imprisoned within its own walls, rituals and loneliness. Warm and lyrical, visceral in its fury, but finally resolute in its ceaseless quest for love and tenderness, this concluding collection dances the demand for better days - that we all must have the opportunity to recover and sing together. Whatever the cost to the crumbling mortar of old Albion.

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9781915606570

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Reviews

""Ralph Dartford's House Anthems highlights the contradictions of living in a small industrial town while having a large, creative, and expansive mind. Music becomes a vortex, a place to channel all those emerging creative thoughts and feelings. In House Anthems, Dartford undertakes the tricky work of weaving these songs' lyrics or themes into poetic memory, but it never seems forced. What emerges is a poetic coming-of-age book with the modern strength of popular music and the ancient mode of storytelling. A pleasure."" Roger Robinson (winner of the TS Eliot Prize for A Portable Paradise) ""Firstly, you should read this because of these pitch-perfect lyrical and elegiac poems with their musicality and sudden sharp heartstopper lines. But it is also an important and unusual look at masculinity being formed and unformed somewhere between the twin poles of Basildon and Bradford, mourning and evening and a post-war England ever poised on the edge of a brave new future and an imagined safer past."" Kate Fox (author of The Oscillations, as heard on BBC Radio 3's The Verb) ""A moving requiem not just for his errant eccentric brother Joe, but for those of a generation who came through the worst of times on society's peripheral new estates. Ralph shows how easily and heartlessly they could be broken. He unflinchingly shares his own messy regrets, that he is not so different to Joe. Ralph retraces his steps through grief to that loved rough place they came from, only to find everything changed. He recalls the conflicted generational shift of values he went through. The poems come with a soundtrack that spoke up for a tribe, their moral compass. These raw poems go beyond Joe and the personal to the universal. They reach out even beyond those of us who still wear Ben Shermans, the trace of a hairstyle and our politics like faded tattoos. They come with a vinegary bus stop kiss to youth. They are for that place we remember and all our beloved smoking mothers."" Martin Figura (author of The Remaining Men)

Author Information

Ralph Dartford hails from Basildon in Essex, and now lives in West Yorkshire, having got there via Australia, Barcelona, and Los Angeles. His first collection, Recovery Songs, was published by Valley Press in 2019, and Hidden Music followed in 2021. Ralph is the poetry editor at Northern Gravy and is studying for a Creative Writing PhD at the University of Huddersfield, where his practice and research is concentrated on the working-class poetry of the twenty-first century. For gainful employment, Ralph works as a project manager and educator for the National Literacy Trust within the Criminal Justice team.

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