Our England
£12.00
These poems confront a loss: the fading dream of a collective bright future that once sustained working-class life. They evoke quiet resilience and solidarity, lingering in the after-hours of a broken and beleagured country that still has the capacity to remake itself.
ISBN: 9781912710997, 68pps., 10 colour images, £12 inc. p. and p. for UK addresses, £12 plus £5 p. and p. for worldwide addresses.
The poems in Our England are nostalgic, but also a challenge to nostalgia with the belief that the future can be rewritten. If these poems mean anything, McGuire hopes they evoke the quiet resilience and solidarity of a country that still has the capacity to remake itself, and whose energy won’t be found in drunken Facebook hate-filled nostalgia, but in the neighbours who are right in front of our eyes. There are also 10 accompanying colour drawings from Martin Gollan, evoking and extending the themes of the poems.
The possibility for a different England is already there; we just have to look beyond newspaper headlines and rage bait to find it. In Our England, McGuire retains the clear-sighted and confident style of his debut collection The Last Days of Alicante. These are admirably unfussy poems; deeply compassionate without being sentimental, driven by a desire to get to the heart of the thing. McGuire shows patience; a willingness to meet England—warts and all—on its own terms; sometimes with despair, but never with judgement. Our England allows for the possibility that we all might be capable of better effort, and it finds amongst the shit, diamonds of profound kindness and hope. —Fran Lock
ISBN: 978-1-912710-99-7, 68pps., 10 colour images, £12 inc. p. and p. for UK addresses, £12 plus £5 p. and p. for worldwide addresses.
