Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Hull, Jane Thomas is an internationally acknowledged authority on the works of Thomas Hardy and on twentieth-century women’s writing.

Since taking early retirement she has moved from critical appreciation to production, and from literature to visual art, exploring painting, pastels, graphic art and photography. Her latest book is a Critical Edition of Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles (co-edited with Phillip Mallett), forthcoming from Norton Publishing; and at the time of writing her visual art can be seen in exhibitions at Feral Art School, Humber Street Gallery and (early in 2024) Brew Café Bar in Hull.

Hilary Pitt has a degree in graphic design and marketing communications and works with authors on creating book covers, typesetting and marketing materials. She especially enjoys working collaboratively on books with artistic or creative content.

Hilary is the go-to designer for LegalHighsPress. In addition to typesetting and formatting the majority of our books, she provided elegant graphics for The Geometry of Minima and stunning designs for Electric Avenue and Grammatology. She is currently updating our website, originally created by Rhiannon Beeson.

PETER PORTER, Times Literary Supplement

CHRISTOPHER HOPE, London Magazine

DAVID KENNEDY, P.N. Review

NICOLAS TREDELL, London Review of Books

STEVEN WALING, The North

The novelist Richard Skinner posted the following on Facebook:

As those of you who know me well know, I only ever write one poetry review every summer, about a book I love, that may or may not have been published recently. This year, I wrote about Peter Didsbury’s amazing collection, A Fire Shared. I’ve never read a book of poems quite like it. Very funny and highly recommended.This is an extract from his review:. . . for me, what is most impressive in Didsbury’s work is his microscopic attention to detail in the natural world. Nowhere is this more evident than in the truly cosmic poem ‘Words at Wharram Percy’, which was originally published in the TLS and was once projected onto the Royal Festival Hall. In the poem, the narrator observes:

Low-skimming birds pick flies from the tensil / surface of the pond, and each touch rings / as if struck from a vanished bell. / Hillside pasture lies fizzing under the rain, / through which a partridge / hurries her brood to safety / among cowslip, oat grass, Yorkshire fog, black medick.

This poem wouldn’t look out of place in Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns with its telescopic look back through time to a wife who calls out ‘in Middle English,/ to a man who mows in the glebe’. All of the natural world and its history falls into this magnificent poem. It is, perhaps, the finest poem in the book, a book which is elsewhere also packed with bright and beautiful things.

This new collection represents an unexpected and welcome resurrection. Didsbury’s career has always pursued an idiosyncratic arc. His debut collection, The Butchers of Hull, was published in the same year (1982) as A Rumoured City, the anthology of Hull poetry edited by Douglas Dunn. Like many Hull poets with the examples of Larkin and Dunn behind them, the young Didsbury rendered vividly the post-industrial landscapes of that city. From the outset, though, his work struck a quirkier, more lucid and baroque note, not to mention the strong religious sensibility that provided its undertow. All these qualities remain present in A Fire Shared, whose title poem finds the poet contemplating a Victorian cholera epidemic with a recently arrived Irish immigrant. Her English is halting, and the combination of empathy and acknowledgement of human difference is vintage Didsbury. Shows of zeal are inimical to Didsbury’s religious temperament, and in ‘Words at Skipsea Brough’, a fulminating dissenting minister is comically turned to a blasted elm. The poet prefers more easy-going forms of religious illumination, which might occur while he stands in the garden or stares at shadows on the kitchen wall. Reveries are often subject to interruption, however. Contemplating the evening star, the poet realizes that what he is in fact looking at is a police helicopter over a park, while ‘Matelots’, addressed to E A Markham, moves from convivial anecdote to a confrontation with the slave trade. Didsbury has lived almost all his life in Hull, but one of the most powerful poems here, ‘Poulton Street’, is set in Fleetwood, where he spent his first six years. The opening evocation of an ancestor crushing her thumb in a mangle may remind readers of Geoffrey Hill’s visions of his own grandmother ‘in the nailer’s darg’. The poem that follows is a remarkable survey of poverty, disease, war and class struggle. In another random encounter, a man approaches Didsbury in the park and says ‘Look . . ./ I’ve got . . . fucking . . ./ NOTHING, mate’. Familiarity with material and spiritual want is common in Didsbury, but out of conditions of need, absence and nothingness, he fashions a poetry of grace, insight and illumination.

The first thing to say about this collection of 38 poems, a paragon of irregularity (as ever) in types, lines and line-lengths, is that a good deal is vintage. It’s more reader-friendly than earlier books and would be an ideal introduction to his imaginative realm (which is Hull and its surrounding landscapes but with hints of transcendence) for the unacquainted. His grand sweep of phrase-making characteristically moves from the rhetorical to quirky turns of the demotic, interspersed with whimsical conceptions, personal asides, observations of nature or the domestic. He can be thought of as a visionary poet in whom the pre-Romantic, Romantic and postmodernist eras somehow co-exist.

The best explanation I can find for these most powerful Didsbury poems is that they are akin to religious experiences. Akin, because . . . poems like ‘A Closing Prospect’ don’t express a particular faith: they don’t seek to justify, explain or establish a relationship with a higher power. Rather, they are scripts, scripts which, in the moment of reading, provide something just as ‘religious’, but arguably rarer, less subjective, and so perhaps more precious than individual reassurance or personal recognition: a sense of wonder.

There is a rich diversity among the poems in this book, a fine addition to this excellent poet’s catalogue.

A Fire Shared radiates warmth and intense colour.