A Rumoured City New Poets from Hull

The rumoured city is elusive, a place of character and commerce, a bustling port in the north of England, but also an historic city with tree-lined roads, in recent years the home of many artists and writers. Not the mythical northern town of the fifties' novel, but a place of generous characters which - says Douglas Dunn - 'encourages an imaginative response to corners and details, sights and sounds, the effects of light and the seasons.' Introducing this anthology of new poets from Hull, Douglas Dunn describes their home as 'a town which by its nature recommends the plainly human.' An estuary city, Hull has a marginal, provisional, almost frontier quality.'For Philip Larkin, Hull is 'a city that is in the world, yet sufficiently on the edge of it to have a different resonance.' In his foreword Larkin writes: 'A place cannot produce poems: it can only not prevent them, and Hull is good at that... These poems are not about Hull, yet is unseen in all of them, the permission of a town that lets you write.' If this anthology is any guide, what the rumoured city allows and nourishes is imaginative depth, diversity of style, and an openness to the world and to the resources of language.The poets included are: Peter Didsbury, Tony Flynn, Ian Gregson, T.F. Griffin, Douglas Houston, Margot K. Juby, Sean O'Brien, Tony Petch, Genny Rahtz and Frank Redpath. A Rumoured City was published at the same time as Peter Didsbury's first collection The Butchers of Hull.