Yoik by Bob Beagrie

Praise for Beagrie’s poetry

These poems are truly ‘made’ by the craftsman in the true meaning of the word – poet as ‘maker’.  They display a remarkable range of tone and reference, tremendous verbal dexterity, strong, muscular, visceral  use of language, yet, at the same time, a softness – a delicate, gossamer-like quality.

One true test of great poems is that they meld form and content, cause and effect, to a point where you can’t see the joins, and in this collection Beagrie does it time and time again.  Ranging from seemingly rough-hewn dialect chat, to the myths and folklore of the Celts, the Native Americans or the Finns, these poems hit the spot.  They raise a tingle on the back of the neck, light a bulb in the brain, more often than any recent collection I have seen.  Beagrie’s handling of different forms and registers, his sheer variety of approach, is stunning.

David Woolley

(Photo by Kevin Howard)

Bob Beagrie lives in Middlesbrough and is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Teesside University. Bob also works in schools and with community groups as a freelance writer. He is a Biscuit Poetry Prize winner and recipient of a Northern Writers Time to Write Award, Yoik was short listed for the Forward Poetry Prize 2009 and his latest book The Seer Sung Husband is one of the eight titles selected for the New Writing North Read Regional Campaign. Between 1997 – 2002 worked as Literature Officer at Cleveland Arts.

His publications include: Gothic Horror (Mudfog 1996), Masque: The Art of the Vampyre (Mudfog 2000), Huginn & Munnin (Biscuit 2002), Endeavour: Newfound Notes (Biscuit 2004), The Isle of St Hild (Hartlepool Borough Council 2004), Perkele (Ek Zuban 2006) and Yoik (Cinnamon 2008), The Seer Sung Husband, (Smokestack Books 2010). Glass Characters is due to be published by Red Squirrel Press in 2011. His poems have also appeared in many magazines and anthologies. has performed his work across the U.K. and Europe.

Along with Andy Willoughby he also runs an independent small press called Ek Zuban, which publishes bi-lingual pamphlets and an occasional writing and arts magazine entitled KENAZ. Throughout his career Bob has worked in collaboration with other writers, visual artists, musicians, actors, dancers, sculptors and film makers to explore the cross disciplinary potential of poetry and spoken word.