This is a collection of essays about, and interviews with, the contemporary British poet, Bill Griffiths. His poetry, written over four decades, is wide-ranging in tone, subject, practice and effect, dealing with anything from London, prison, hospital, colonial history, boats, cartoons, old English and dialect poetry, or the classics. Griffiths has long been celebrated as a leading figure of the British Poetry Revival, yet this is to underestimate the continuing impact of this exciting and accessible writer. These essays aim to help ordinary readers and students gain insight into Griffiths's astonishing jewel-like lyrics and to re-situate him in the mainstream of British poetry.

Bill Griffiths's mix of street-wise academia and boundary dancing poetry have engaged audiences now for at least four decades. He possesses that ability to mix chance with intent, history with fiction and irreverent music with non-received pronunciation in order to deliver what has become one of the most consistently creative bodies of poetic writing made during the past century. That his name does not yet trip off the tongue of mainstream poetry buyers is something that should be swiftly corrected. To know where we are with our verse in the UK an understanding of Griffiths is essential. -- Peter Finch In a world packed with fraudulent choirboys, every now and again a truly oppositional voice gets through. Bill Griffiths has one of those voices. It's great to see his shattered sea shanties and anarchist shards of sprung wit finally getting a little of the attention they deserve. -- Sean Bonney Bill Griffiths is a national treasure and it sometimes seems he is buried under a mound like the Sutton Hoo treasures, inviolate, timely and glittering, but there's not a speck of dirt on him. Our treasure hoard is his word hoard. He loans us his unique perspectives - gnomic, relaxed, critical, esoteric, outsider - along with his loan words. Compressed like a jewel they accept the elucidation generously offered to them, without specifically inviting it. This book provides that. -- Robert Sheppard Bill Griffiths is one the most distinguished poets to come to the fore in British poetry in the 1970s. He is at once erudite and accomplished, drawing from Old English as often as modern and contemporary parlance. From his ground-breaking sequence Cycles to his translations of The Battle of Maldon to his more recent Durham, his work engages with gravitas, humour and song - often in the same poem. Reading and rereading his work continues to be both invigorating and sustaining. Each new collection of his work brings reliable strength with vulnerable surprise. -- Allen Fisher

ARCHIVE 1. Jeff Nuttall: Introduction 2. Iain Sinclair: Diorama of the Fixed Eye-Ball 3. Eric Mottram: 'Every New Book Hacking on Barz': The Poetry of Bill Griffiths 4. Clive Bush: The Secret Commonwealth NINETEEN SEVENTIES 5. Paula Claire: Bill Griffiths : A Severe Case of Hypergraphia 6. Sean O'Huigin: Earl's Court Squared 7. Alan Halsey: Pirate Press: A Bibliographical Excursion 8. Robert Hampson: Bill Griffiths and the Old English Lyric EIGHTIES AND AFTER 9. Tony Baker: From Black Cocoa Out 10. John Seed: 'In music far mair sweet': Bill Griffiths in Durham 11. Fernanda Teixeira de Medeiros: '& that / that divide': poetry and social commentary in Bill Griffiths 12. Gilbert Adair: Darwin's Dialogues as Punctuations of Equilibrium 13. William Rowe: Bill Griffiths's The Mud Fort: Language as vulnerability and revolt in an age of compliance 14. Steve Cox: Scars in a haunted landscape: Bill Griffiths' Ghost Tales of Seaville INTERVIEW 15. Bill Griffiths and William Rowe BIBLIOGRAPHY 16. Doug Jones VISUALS