I Leant Upon a Copper Pipe: Warrington Poems

Pre-order now: for delivery December 2025

I Leant Upon a Copper Pipe is a collection steeped in Warrington’s grit and glory. It is also surprisingly spiritual, deeply philosophical, frequently bawdy, and – in one memorable instance – scatological beyond the reach of existing vocabulary. John Farquhar writes with the deeply personal investment of someone who knows exactly where he’s from, and exactly how precarious, hilarious and holy that inheritance can be.

Threaded through the poems are hopeless loves – especially for the local rugby league team (“If they lost a match I loved them more, so by the first few weeks we were close friends”) – and the familiar struggles of the young working-class scholar, caught between two worlds (“If he don’t speak like us he’s got a chance. This is why we voted Wilson in”). Farquhar turns these tensions into fuel, using poetry not as ornament but as a sharper, faster way to get at meaning.

At the heart of the collection lies Bridge Foot, Warrington’s main crossing over the Mersey, a muddy, easily dismissed stretch of water that the poet sees instead as a metaphor for modern existence: weary, overlooked, and quietly profound. Why be a poet? What does belonging mean? Can you ever come home again after writing about it? These poems ask the questions most writers avoid – and they do it with wit, ferocity and a kind of bruised, ecstatic clarity.