Geoff Hattersley's poetry is at the forefront of a surrealism of the provinces. Its landscape is usually urban South Yorkshire, sometimes real, sometimes of the mind - but, as Ian McMillan has remarked, 'maybe they're the same thing'. Influences as diverse as Frank O'Hara, Gunter Grass, Bob Dylan, Charles Bukowski and Lenny Bruce fuel terse, aphoristic records of the grotesqueries of everyday living in the age of unreason. The laconic, the passive, the reticent and the comic become the only ways of speaking truly about the 1980s and early 1990s. -- David Kennedy
There is real gusto in his work as well as a manic but controlled humour. He can evoke odd or unnerving states of mind, enigmas, private terrors, domestic emergencies, with techniques or ways of looking at things that seem devised to give the familiar a good shake... Cheeky, imaginative, cerebral, witty - it is poetry with a lot to say for itself. -- Douglas Dunn * Financial Times *
