Winter Migrants

An erotic journey over the fells to a coastal meditation on winter.

Tom Pickard (born 1946, Newcastle upon Tyne, England) is a poet, and documentary film maker who was an important initiator of the movement known as the British Poetry Revival. Pickard grew up in the working-class suburbs of Cowgate, Newcastle upon Tyne, and left school at the age of fourteen. Three years later he met Basil Bunting and was instrumental in the older poet's return to writing in the early 1960s. In 1963, Pickard founded and ran the Morden Tower Book Room where he organised a series of readings by British and American modernist tradition poets, including Bunting. He also set up the Ultima Thule Bookshop - specialising in poetry, music and alternative counter-culture publications - between 1969 and 1973. In 1974, his television play Squire was broadcast by the BBC. His film credits include We Make Ships (1988), Channel 4, Tell Them in Gdansk (1989), Channel 4, Birmingham Is What I Think With (1991) and The Shadow and the Substance (1994). Pickard's poetry owes much to his reading of Bunting, the Objectivist poets and of the Black Mountain poets, but is also rooted in his own urban working-class Tyneside background. His publications include High on the Walls (1968), The Order of Chance (1971), Hero Dust: New and Selected Poems (1979), Tiepin Eros: New and Selected Poems (1994), fuckwind (1999) Hole in the Wall: New and Selected Poems (2002), The Dark Months of May (2004) and Ballad of Jamie Allan (2007); the last three published in Chicago by Flood Editions. Ballad of Jamie Allan was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award. His part-autobiographical More Pricks Than Prizes was published in Boston by Pressed Wafer in 2010. Carcanet Press (UK) published Hoyoot: Collected Poems and Songs in 2014.