NORTHANGERLAND Re-versioning the poetry of Branwell Brontë

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