Alden Carrow – författare

Cumbria refuses to be scenery. This collection walks the county place by place — from the volcanic pikes of the central fells to the limestone shoulders of the coast — reading the land not as a view but as a record of pressure: ice-carved valleys, collapsing slate, old lead-mining scars healed over by moor grass, and the hefted flocks of Herdwick sheep that still mark the line between pasture and fell.Each of the more than seventy poems is anchored to a named place: a fell, a tarn, a market town, a stone circle, a Roman fort, a stretch of tide-scoured coast. Together they trace Cumbria's fractured geology — Skiddaw slate, Borrowdale volcanics, sedimentary limestone — and the human lives built across the fault lines between them: the shepherd set against the slate, the tourist town against the working port. There is no postcard here, only the weather, the rock, and the long memory of the ground.Lakes To Fells In Poetry is the third volume in the British Counties In Verse series, following earlier collections on Cornwall and North Yorkshire, and its most sustained study yet of a single landscape. Written from the boots up rather than the view down, it will reward readers of place-rooted poetry, hill walkers, and anyone who has stood on a fell top in bad weather and felt the ground answer back.

Beneath every familiar landscape lies a deeper one.Somerset In Verse reads a county through what lies under it — four hundred million years of rock, ice, water and ore, and everything human hands have since built, dug, drowned and abandoned on top of it.Seventy-six poems travel from the red sandstone spine of Exmoor to the drowning peat of the Levels. Dunkery Beacon, where waterlogged soil creeps the Bronze Age dead a fraction downhill each year. Muchelney, cut off and returned to itself every winter. Glastonbury Tor, a resistant cap of sandstone left standing by the slow subtraction of the marsh. Watchet's retreating cliffs, the lead the Romans smelted on Mendip, the Hamstone hauled out of Ham Hill and walked into garden walls, the reactor blocks at Hinkley Point seen from a town pressed flat against the flood line.Here water must be pumped upward, hoisted against its own dead weight, to be lifted back to the sea. The rhynes hold. The sluice gates hold for one more season. The floodwater lacks malice. The rock does not yearn. They simply outlast the pumps.This is not a guidebook and these are not poems of nostalgia. They are poems of attention — precise, unsentimental, built from the heavy specific names of things. Language is treated here like masonry, with no mortar of sentiment.The fourth volume in British Counties In Verse, an ongoing poetic journey across the counties of Great Britain. It stands entirely alone.Approximately 100 pages.Read it, and you will not cross this county again without looking down.

North Yorkshire In Verse - Moor To Shore In Poetry is a lyrical journey through one of England's best-loved counties, travelling from the heather-clad heights of the Dales and the North York Moors down to the cliffs and fishing villages of the Yorkshire coast. Arranged as an alphabetical pilgrimage from Airedale to York, these poems wander the market squares of Thirsk, Ripon and Skipton, take tea in Harrogate, climb the keep at Knaresborough, and stand beneath the towers of Fountains Abbey and York Minster. They follow the working history of Airedale's mills and Middlesbrough's ironworks, the quiet grandeur of Malham Cove, and the salt air of Whitby, Staithes and Robin Hood's Bay. Alden Carrow writes with an eye for the ordinary made luminous - cobbled streets, market-day chatter, abbey ruins, the long light over open moorland. As the collection's epigraph has it: "e;Every stone remembers. Every story rests in the weathered silence between voices."e; Part of the British Counties In Verse series, following Cornwall In Verse and Cumbria In Verse, this collection is a gentle, evocative companion for anyone who knows North Yorkshire's towns and dales by heart - or is discovering them for the first time.