Tom Leonard

Poetry from the French Revolution to World War I (Poetry)

Radical Renfrew

Gavin

A nice thing about Britain, or the Old World at large, is that there’s a piece of art for most places. Thus even my tiny village has a passable ballad, ‘where the river meets the sea’, while my mate’s Wirral has a full seven hundred years of contempt to draw on (as well as my top album of 1998). 

Paisley has the first bit of Espedair Street – but also hundreds of Industrial Era pamphlets and gazetteers that Tom Leonard dug through, finding a hotbed of utopian socialism, zero-wave feminism and farmer’s rage. (I don’t know if it’ll sink in with locals though; they’re more likely to get excited about Gerard Butler going to Paisley Grammar.) "Radical" isn't a compliment, as Leonard (and Kelman, and Nairn, and Macleod) think it is, but it often marks at least interesting things.

See here.

Radical Renfrew Poetry from the French Revolution to World War I (Poetry)

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