A cure for woodness - Michael Haslam

"Michael Haslam's compelling, densely musical work emerges from a joyous cauldron of babble, the place where folksong comes from, or even further back: its combination of emotional directness and compact, ornate language is reminiscent of the medieval Pearl poem, or of Old English Verse."
Paul Batchelor, The Guardian.

A Cure for Woodness is the third part of Haslam's trilogy Music, the first two parts of which are The Music Laid her Songs in Language (2001) and A Sinner Saved by Grace (2005). Like the first two parts of the trilogy, A Cure for Woodness is a reaffirmation of the nature, language and music with which the poet finds himself surrounded in his hilltop home in the Pennines.

"I haven't read anything that sounds as beautiful as this for years."
Robert Potts, The Guardian on Music

Michael Haslam was born in Bolton, Lancashire in 1947, and has lived in the Calder Valley since 1970. Widely published in the network associated with 'The Cambridge School of Poetry' in the 1960s, he became widely known through the publication, to great acclaim, of his collected poems, A Whole Bauble (Carcanet). He has worked as a labourer most of his life, but now, thanks to a legacy, he is able to devote his time to writing.