M is the third collection from Antony Rowland, Professor of Literary Studies in English at the University of Salford, whose work has been compared with poets as disparate as John Ashbery and Ezra Pound.
Jeffrey Wainwright has described his poetry as "significant and powerful", and nowhere is this more apparent than in M, an ode to Manchester in the present moment and to the world it finds itself in, awash with the movement of peoples, cultures, politics and words.
The central sequence in M ('Manchester') responds to the murder in 2013 of Kieran Crump-Raiswell in Whalley Range, and tackles the contemporary themes of terrorism, industrial decline, and Icelandic violence. Ranging from Minorca to Cheetham Hill, Rowland's poetry covers a characteristic range of subjects and forms in what Peter Riley has termed 'an original and thoughtful handling of a major European modernist mode'.
This collection also includes the poems that received the Manchester Poetry Prize in 2012.