City of dog - George Charlton

The city of dog is Newcastle, the centre of the known world for George Charlton and fellow drinkers of dog, or brown ale - also dog as in dog-eared, dog-end, dog days, dog-watch and dog's life. The poems move from nights out in city pubs, set against a background of urban decay and economic gloom, through a record of adolescent joy and pain (of course there's a girl involved), to end in the dog-tired suburbs and beyond. Throughout the book runs the ghost of a ction, that of a seventeen year old Merchant Navy navigating cadet who wanted to be a poet, and a forty-odd year old poet who wanted to go to sea, but failed the eyesight test.