Alice and the North
Alice and the North
Anne Caldwell
Paperback
Alice and the North is a sequence of prose poems that form a love song to the North, its post-industrial landscapes, wild uplands, obsession with weather, seasonal change and awkwardness. Like Lewis Carroll's Alice before her, the lead character shifts and changes as her journey across the North continues; she is at turns playful, sexy, rebellious and adventurous, carving a new identity for the region as she goes.
From herring quines to the hidden corners of Manchester, from Lytham St Anne’s to the canals of Congleton, readers are invited to grow up with Alice as she finds her voice – straddling the territory between prose and poetry, exploring the down-to-earth cadences of everyday speech and the richness of the North’s many idioms and dialects.
Alice even finds time to gently tease the 'titans' of Northern poetry, Ted Hughes and Simon Armitage, whose voices have long shaped the poetry-reading public's idea of the North. Now, however, they must step aside, and make room for Alice...
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Imprint: Valley Press
Published: November 2020
ISBN: 9781912436521
Catalogue no: VP0173
Page count: 66
Trim size: 198 x 129 mm
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Praise for Alice and the North:
"Anne Caldwell’s poems are intensely alive, flighty as young animals, powerful and varied as the sea."
— Alison Brackenbury
"Anne Caldwell’s Alice is at once rooted and flighty, wildly sensual and, in the very best sense, ordinary. As she navigates the Wonderland that is the North, she takes the reader with her through a vividly reimagined place of changing identity. Caldwell is an immensely sensitive poet with a keen sense of both the poignancy and exuberance of life and its tiny moments. In Alice And The North, she has created a compelling poetic narrative, conjured a North that is both strange and familiar and given us a very particular Alice who might also be an everywoman for our times."
— Amanda Dalton
About the author
Anne Caldwell is a poet, editor and lecturer with The Open University, based in West Yorkshire. She is the author of six collections, including The Language of Now (Valley Press, 2026) and Neither Here Nor There (SurVision, 2024), winner of a James Tait Prize. She co-edited The Valley Press Anthology of Prose Poetry (2019) and Prose Poetry in Theory and Practice (Routledge, 2022) with Oz Hardwick.
Anne’s writing about peatbogs was supported by a DYCP Lottery Award from Arts Council England (2024), including residencies in West Yorkshire and Finland with filmmaker Lewis Landini and dance artist Inari Hulkkonen; she is also part of The Boggarts, an arts collective working to save Walshaw Moor.