Oswald's Book of Hours - Softcover

Steve Ely

3.9

10 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0957172230 ISBN 13: 9780957172234

Publisher: Smokestack Books, 2013

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Shortlisted for the 2013 Forward Prize for Best First Collection.

Oswald, King of Northumbria from 635 to 642 AD, was a warrior, evangelist, hunter, scholar, martyr and, most famously of all, main rival to George s claim to be patron saint of England. Oswald s Book of Hours is a series of elegies and eulogies for Oswald, written in the voices of an unlikely band of northern radicals, including union leader Arthur Scargill, hermit Richard Rolle, brigand John Nevison, Catholic rebel Robert Aske and Oswald himself. Brutal, provocative and thrillingly original, Oswald s Book of Hours is a pocket history of northern subversion and exile, going back before the Industrial Revolution, before the Reformation, before England even existed.

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Review:

In Steve Ely the North has found its voice in work that echoes Ted Hughes, Basil Bunting, Geoffrey Hill, the bloke in the corner shop, the Yorkshire breeze and autodidacts and pub philosophers across the region and beyond. This can become our creation myth, our encyclopaedia, our atlas, our sacred book.
--Iam Macmillan

About the Author:

Steve Ely, a former Sunday League footballer, revolutionary socialist and secondary school Headteacher, is a Catholic in the tradition of John Ball, and he hunts with dogs. Previous publications include a novel Ratmen and his poetry collections Englalaland and Incendium Amoris (2017). He lives in the Osgoldcross wapentake in the West Riding of Yorkshire.

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