Imagined Corners

For over thirty years Keith Armstrong has been taking his poetry to what John Donne called "the round earth''s imagined corners" - giving poetry readings in the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Poland, Iceland, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Spain, Sweden, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, the United States, Jamaica, Kenya and Cuba. At the same time he has been exploring some of the imagined corners of his native North East of England, its sometimes heroic past and its post-industrial discontents.

Imagined Corners brings together, for the first time, poems from all the corners of Keith Armstrong''s imagination. It''s a trumpet call to those who, in the words of John Donne, are the victims of:

"war, dearth, age, agues, tyrannies,
Despair, law."

It is a manifesto for the public ownership of poetry. It''s a hymn to a broken internationalism. And it''s a beery love-poem for the North East.

"There are those who tell the terrible truth in all its loveliness. Keith Armstrong is one of them, a fine poet who refuses to turn his back on the wretched of the Earth. He is one of the best and I hope his voice will be heard more and more widely." - Adrian Mitchell

"If you are old enough to remember Britain before it fell under the malicious spell of those who believe to catch a bus if you''re over thirty is proof of failure, it will remind you of gentler, sweeter times... in place of the empty, near-manic, self-congratulatory but superficial and compensatory sensibility of modern culture, Armstrong gives us a sense of what we have lost, how we have gone wrong and reminds us of the dirt and darkness beneath the neon and glitz." - Penniless Press

"rooted in the Tyneside music-hall tradition, closely behind which was the august balladry of the Borders... the authentic note of the Northern poet." - Michael Standen, Other Poetry

"postcards from an alternative grand tour, journal entries from another, more innocent time, when the world spun more slowly and we had time to befriend strangers and notice things... celebrating people and places, a world of anecdote and adventure, strong drink and life itself." - Paul Summers, Dreamcatcher