Resilient and fluent, this is a confident debut, set in a landscape of Northern light and Northern grit. A young couple found in a photograph become the father in the mills, the mother at the washing tub; we hear of romance, Cambridge, betrayal, an ageing self, village life in Yorkshire. But what makes Alan Prout’s poems so memorable is their persuasive cadence and buoyant tone: unpretentious, irreverent, moving, witty, Brechtian, irrepressibly upbeat.
Rosie Jackson