A thriving trade in women by the Tees

COMRADE LAUGHTER by Andy Croft (Flambard, Stable Cottage, East Fourstones, Hexham, Northumberland, NE47 5DX, £7.50)

What Wordsworth was to the Lake District, Andy Croft is to Teesside. Born in Cheshire, he could be a 'Boro boy, so sharp are his perceptions of his adopted town:

A little town, the well-planned new estate

Of Joseph Pease, a dock, a railway line

A pottery, a square, a model state;

Or else a classic study in decline,

A 1930s slum town, worthless, broke,

A failed experiment of flawed design;

A gold-rush Klondyke, breathing fire and smoke, Ironopolis! An infant Hercules! A commonwealth of work, A field of folk;

Or this one, post-industrial, on its knees,

Awash with crack and smack, that likes to boast

A thriving trade in women by the Tees.

In another poem, the people of "Mudfog" labour to satisfy a steel giant, which rewards them by "upping and offing" to Korea:

All children know giants are monsters

Who travel in seven-league boots,

So don't be reliant on a corporate giant

And small-men in oversize suits.

Always direct, Croft's poetry burns with his strong left-wing convictions and also (which many would say is the same thing) a passionate sense of our common humanity. These lines on September 11 are unlikely to be bettered:

There are some dates that we should all remember

When History - as on that fell September

Is terrorised by monsters in the slime,

When something so repulsive and primeval

Crawls out to write its signature in blood,

And all the world is forced to watch as evil,

Devours the kind, the ordinary and the good.

OTTERS AND MARTENS by Colin Simms (Shearsman Books, 58 Velwell Rd, Exeter, EX4 4LD, £9.95)

FROM a poet of the urban North-East to one whose work is suffused with the equally tough Northern landscape. For 50 years Colin Simms has been writing quite extraordinary poetry, often re-forging the language in the manner of Gerard Manley Hopkins, to catch the intensity of his vision of nature.

For Simms is a wonderful naturalist, the first person, more than 20 years ago, to establish the survival of pine-martens in Northumberland's forests. Here he is on that elusive creature:

The way of a marten in trees is no pinnace in seas

that squirrels can seem, even dormice at their scale:

is bewildering if there is a chase: it is speed

it is confusion of limbs, and skill and risk...

Born in 1939, Simms is as shy and hard locate as the two animal species that chiefly feature in this ample collection, still only a small body of his total output. The jacket places him only in the North of England. But he was once based at the Yorkshire Museum, York, and the widespread flooding of the Vale in 1968, which he attributed partly to ill-considered drainage and forestry schemes, provoked these lines:

They've cleared the willow to speed the water flow.

ings, otters' homes, all else of alder-carr goes

a balance of centuries to the balance-sheet yields.

Floods will increase, and still they gripp uplands, deep-plough for the new forests, let rip

earth movers to straighten courses in places

they curse as stagnant....

Nature reasserts with storms...

Among identified, and often dated, locations of the poems are Bowes, Swaledale, Great Smeaton, Lunedale, Upper Teesdale. A poem By the Seph, Bilsdale's little river, includes a very typical Simms phrase: "the brunting music of the beck". Untypical of most nature poetry, his poems can often seem a tangle, a bit like the undergrowth in which he detects his otters and martens. But their raw-boned power is quite remarkable.

THE LISTENING EARTH: Poems from the Countryside 1400-2000 selected by Jinny Birkbeck (Merlin Unwin Books, £14.99)

ARRANGED in four parts - The Way It Was, A Celebration, Spirit of Place and - surely the one for our time - Destruction - a well-balanced choice of old favourites and the unfamiliar makes up this anthology, profits from which go to the Rank Foundation Fund, to help rural communities and businesses in the wake of the foot-and-mouth epidemic.

NEW POEMS ON THE UNDERGROUND (Cassell, £6.99)

INCLUDING Chaucer, but with the emphasis on contemporary work, here is the complete collection of poems from the last two years of this popular series. A great pleasure as usual, but surely there was a blip in selecting for display to the cramped thousands on the Underground the lines:

"Let me at least collect your smells

as specimens: your armpits, woollen sweater...''?

Other recently-received poetry includes:

Collected Later Poems 1988-2000 by R S Thomas (Bloodaxe, £9.95), a large collection by the great Welsh poet, who died in 1987;

Sojourner by Gillian Allnutt (Bloodaxe £7.95), meditative poems that demand a little patience;

A Red Cherry on a White-tiled Floor by Maram al-Massri (Bloodaxe £8.95), sensual love poetry by a France-based Syrian, published with the original Arabic alongside the translation;

Love and Inspiration by Margaret Greenhalgh (Rosebud Publications, 19, Tom Raine Court, Darlington, DL1 15B, Tel: 01325 467118, no price stated) - "poems of the spirit" by a Darlington widow who began writing poetry in grief when her husband died in 1989;

Rhymes for Our Times by Gordon Ross (Sessions of York, £3.50, or £4.50 from publishers, Huntington Rd, YO31 9HS), poems of everyday experience.

Published: 21/12/2004