To No Place

Peter Armstrong’s To No Place includes a substantial selection of new poems written over the last decade in which he has continued to explore the themes of faith and doubt, loss and belonging that have long been the hallmark of his work. Throughout, he pursues an enduring engagement with place, whether in his native North-East England, or the edge-landscapes of Donegal, Hebrides, or the Baltic coast. Anne Stevenson highlighted a cinematic aspect to Armstrong’s poetry, and these poems present a vision of landscape that gives as much weight to a forgotten motorway spur as to a wider rural and post-industrial North, or the yet wider spaces of Western Australia.

The book brings together poems from Armstrong’s four collections, Risings (1988), The Red-funnelled Boat (1998), The Capital of Nowhere (2003) and The Book of Ogham (2012), together with others from his chapbook Madame Noire (2008) and work published in anthologies and journals.

A selection of Peter Armstrong’s early poetry was included in one of Bloodaxe’s first publications, Neil Astley’s anthology Ten North-East Poets in 1980. Now this career retrospective volume is published by Bloodaxe nearly 50 years later on Armstrong’s 70th birthday.