Ginnel

Exploring the English hinterlands of middle-class Headingley and working-class Meanwood, this collection of poetry is pervaded by a sense of restless wandering between two worlds and times. Set in and around the ginnels—passages between houses—of Leeds, where the author grew up in the 1960s, this unified sequence of poems revisits the places of childhood with acute particularity, recalling familiar sights and sounds, local characters, favorite walks, and dialect learned when playing in back streets. This is poetry of firm local attachment, overlaid by a child's developing awareness of class divisions, separation, mortality, and loss.

Lucy Newlyn is a professor of English language and literature at Oxford University and a fellow of St. Edmund Hall. She is the author of Reading Writing and Romanticism: The Anxiety of Reception, which won the British Academy's Rose Mary Crawshay prize. She is the coeditor of two volumes of Creative Writing in Academic Practice, and her poetry was included in the Oxford Poets Anthology.