NORTHANGERLAND Re-versioning the poetry of Branwell Brontë

By Andrew Taylor

In Northangerland Andrew Taylor has taken the black sheep of the Bront? family and pushed him centre-stage, repurposing Bronwyn's pseudonym as a title. 'Re-versioning', as Taylor dubs his process, is not so much offering a parallel text or a commentary on the original, but effects a distillation of it, isolating its essence, updating. He resembles Basil Bunting deleting and scribbling his way through Shakespeare's sonnets, as he exchanges Bront?'s rhetoric for sculpted lines and deft sound-shapes (the rhymes chiming internally across their precise new line-breaks). Taylor is like an architect decluttering the Bront? Parsonage into a modern minimalist and open plan living space: 'forms refuse the real/ & unreal to confuse phantom/ paths of joy'. For all its careful acknowledgement of sources, this is an assured work for our times.

Robert Sheppard

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1739721322
• ISBN13: 9781739721329
• Release Date: September 2022
• Publisher: Leafe Press
• Length: 74 Pages
• Weight: 0.23 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 5.5" x 8.5"