Milton Row

“Milton Row is a long poem expressing the author’s anger and scorn at the education system as he experienced it in the mid-twentieth century. … Newlands is in the tradition of Swift, Poe and Dryden as he castigates schools and authorities, the government and national attitudes to education. While the first part of the poem concentrates on a highly visual account of the school and local area, in the second he writes more generally and widely about attitudes and systems that are blighting the country, and young people in particular. It is not all gloom and invective – there is humour – but overall it is the white-hot anger that moves the poem along at a headlong pace. The reader is appalled by what is revealed, yet convinced of its truth.

The verse itself gives an equal amount of pleasure. Newlands has rightly chosen the rhyming couplets of his predecessors, a challenge that most ‘amateurs’ would fall down on. Newlands doesn’t, because he knows exactly how to manipulate it. … Rhymes are not forced, but fall naturally and at times quite unnoticeably; the vocabulary is extensive, from the everyday to the specialised and at times vulgar. One can read the work as much for how it is written as for what is written, and that says a great deal about the skill of the writer.

This book is a considerable addition to the poetry of the mid-twentieth century and I would hope that it would find a wide readership. It is not just for readers of poetry, but accessible enough for anyone, as easy as reading a novel, yet with the added bonus of its form and structure.”

— Maurice Reeve