THIS definitive collection of Fred Reed’s dialect poetry – first published in 1999, 14 years after his death in 1985 – has until now been unavailable for more than a decade.
As Melvyn Bragg states in a foreword: “He is a poet whose words speak aloud from the page. He would all but sing his poems, and even those of us without a smattering of the North-Eastern can find a tune there.
“Fred was most comfortable and most prolific in the dialect around Ashington. He was a miner there, edited the colliery magazine, and through Ashington he became the embodiment of Northumbrian verse in this century.”
Since his death the poet’s reputation has continued to grow and he has been called ‘the English Burns’. This collection of his work includes more than 140 poems. Funny verse such as ‘Poachin’:
The world’s se full o’ strife; Time the poacher poached, The laird poached his dowter, An’ the gamekeeper poached his wife.
And poems about the language itself, including:
When a Northumbrian speaks t’ ye, ye see, He’s taalkin’ in the tongue o’ history. He disn’t wave wi’ wild gesticulations; Ye’ll knaa jist whaat he means bi intonations.
