Todmorden is a little town in the Pennines, and in the late 20s and early 30s it was a cotton-milling town of about 22,000 inhabitants. In The Vale of Todmorden, Herbert Lomas presents us with a sequence of short poems by way of a personal history of the lost Todmorden of that time. It is not political history, but it records the private pains of public history - of how people dealt with and endured the ups and downs of the violent and rich culture they'd been thrown into, and of how creative they were, inventing themselves and making language, music, companionship and love out of an often bleak inheritance.