'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.
- ISBN10 1903039746
- ISBN13 9781903039748
- Publish Date 26 May 2005
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 19 August 2015
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher Carcanet Press Ltd
- Imprint OxfordPoets
- Format Paperback
- Pages 64
- Language English