Following the Fall of whatever-it-was-that-fell in 1990, Andy Croft's Just as Blue offers a view of contemporary history as seen from somewhere between Moscow and Middlesbrough, anger and dismay, between the Restoration of the Stuarts, the Fall of France and the end of the Cold War. With a bit of help from Virgil, Shelley, Bunyan, Lord Rochester, Louis Aragon, Randall Swingler and the Welsh miner-poet Mogg Williams, these poems look back on the final years of a terrible century in the certain knowledge that the new one is going to be just as bad.
'If Matthew Arnold had been a communist living in the last decade of our century, he would have written like Andy Croft.' MORNING STAR
'The subjects he tackles are unashamedly Big: democracy, history, freedom, religion and class, many of them complete with old-fashioned proper nouns.' SCRATCH
'A poetic marathon man.' IRON
'A skillful traditionalist with strong opinions.' THUMBSCREW
Just as Blue costs £7.00 and was published in March 2001.
ISBN: 978-1-873226-44-5
Andy Croft lives in Middlesbrough, where he has been active for many years in community writing projects. Writing Residencies include the Hartlepool Headland, the Great North Run and HMP Holme House. His verse-play about the history of Middlesbrough, Smoke! was shown at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2004.
His books include Red Letter Days, Out of the Old Earth, A Weapon in the Struggle, Selected Poems of Randall Swingler, Holme and Away, Comrade Heart and forty-four books for teenagers, mostly about football.
His books of poetry include Nowhere Special, Gaps Between Hills (with Mark Robinson), Headland, Just as Blue, Great North, Comrade Laughter, Sticky and two anthologies, Red Sky at Night (edited with Adrian Mitchell) and North by North East (edited with Cynthia Fuller).
He writes a regular poetry column in the Morning Star and runs Smokestack Books.
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