The Eastern Boroughs

The author's fifth major collection, following And Ada Ann, Out Walking, Blood and Dreams and Greeting Want, containing work written over the past six years. A number of the poems in The Eastern Boroughs express a concern with consciousness, the sense of self, and how that self is constituted in writing. This volume was subsequently collected in the author's Collected Poems, also available from Shearsman Books. "These are poems about the inner life with the external concreteness and economy of Imagism... his three previous volumes have won high praise from critics who trust their noses." (Herbert Lomas, Ambit) "Welch's explorations of personal inner-space and the outer-spaces of the urban (especially a multicultural London) are inextricably mixed, in poetry which, while often sparsely textured in particular passages, is dense in its larger accumulation of significance. A book that will repay repeated readings." (Glyn Pursglove, Swansea Review) "[The] solitary turning away is part of what makes the poems in The Eastern Boroughs so sad, the split from the beauty of the world that writing and self-consciousness enforce, without which poetry would not exist. Pleasure and melancholy tend to be seeded one within the other, and their intertwining is well-mapped in the ache and beauty of this collection. (James Wilkes, in Terrible Workonline)