an apology to the East Coast, and an (un) discovered gem: Roy Cockcroft

Irredeemable East coast,  light fading, warmth leaching out of the fabric of things as flat as the grey light and the grey North Sea, where the light is light that’s left behind, a used-up earlier light, the sun up and out of the sluggish sea and out of the east, leaving all the mud and shale, the suspended silt of cities, and the run-off of endless fields and darkening wolds, this soup, this dirty laundry rinsing, this used up stuff.

An apology for this is long overdue. I can’t even bear to type it with its original line breaks. I want to say sorry to poet Sally Goldsmith, on whom I inflicted it at a writers’ workshop. In mitigation, if mitigation there be, I should say I wrote it after a particularly miserable day in Arbroath with the dull queasiness of a hangover. There can be few more dispiriting places…