House Anthems

Early praise for House Anthems

“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)

 “Ralph Dartford’s sensitivity and perceptive poetry are razor-sharp in capturing the serendipity of both life and place. His choice of music to accompany each piece is perfection. House Anthems is nothing short of brilliant!”
– Jill Adam (Director, Louder than Words festival)

“From Basildon to Bradford, Ralph Dartford has composed a fractured libretto to an imaginary soundtrack for the suburbs and satellite towns of our often unfair isle. Fuelled by a primeval sense of loss, love and healing and shaped by a maestro’s ear for the music of language, House Anthems is a soaring, heart-bruising triumph.”
– Russ Litten (author of Kingdom)

“This collection is like a private tour through Dartford’s world of lost places. He guides us in with a deft, lyrical hand, picking out light and shade; unerring, unforgiving eyes on what he sees and a subtle sense of hope that seems to suggest it might not be too late to change them.”
– Vicky Foster (author of It Happened Like This)

“There is a commanding mix of tangible rage and tender-hearted love pulsing through the arteries of House Anthems. Ralph Dartford’s lyrical new collection is stained with the spilt blood of unresolved grief and marked with the scars of survival, but these poems are also imbued with fragile optimism for our collective recovery – for the eternal hope that ‘we will hear music that stitches / our reasons to beat again’. I loved it.”
– Amanda Huggins (author of An Unfamiliar Landscape)

“Dartford’s collection House Anthems is both an elegy to a beloved brother and a touching homage to the inevitability of time passing within our homes and towns. These poems are shot through with a pulse which serves to comfort in times of grief: ‘we will hear music that stitches our reasons to beat again’. A hugely insightful and thoughtful collection.”
– Katy Mahon (author of Some Indefinable Cord)

“It feels like a soundtrack to winter, to grief and the memory of heat. Finished in the way the past is, but unfinished in the way that the past is always just out of reach.”
– Louise Fazackerley (author of Bird Street)

“These are Essex poems, Bradford poems, poems outside time and place – so specific they are universal.”
– Gavin Jones (author of The Curlew)

“Ralph Dartford’s latest collection reads like a Rough Guide to an England that continues to appal and astonish, littered with defeated and surviving characters.”
– Peter Pegnall (author of Broken Eggs) 

“The art of recovery is Ralph Dartford’s métier: integrating the body and the body politic, the social structure and the anxieties of living, his poems transcend the fractures and the scarring to yield a message of raddled hope. The ‘anthems’ that affix emotion in a place in time are antennae of recognition, filters for reflecting, and sometimes deflecting, retrospective pain.”
– Steve Whitaker (The Yorkshire Times)