Winner of the Michael Marks Publishers Award 2012.
Sheffield twinned with Mars – Roger McGough.
101 poets bring Sheffield and South Yorkshire to life in brilliant and brilliantly varied verse - by turns descriptive, funny, challenging, and always engrossing.
The Sheffield Anthology includes poems by Simon Armitage, Ann Atkinson, Paul Bentley, Jarvis Cocker, Amanda Dalton, Carol Ann Duffy, William Empson, Roy Fisher, Geoff Hattersley, Roger McGough, Ian McMIllan, E A Markham, David Morley, Helen Mort, Andrew Motion, Daljit Nagra, Sean O'Brien, Alan Payne, Lesley Perrins, Adam Piette, Maurice Riordan, Seni Seneviratne, Diana Syder, David Tait, John Turner, Christine Webb, Ben Wilkinson, Noel Williams and River Wolton.
'Sheffield' by Stanley Cook
When my father’s generation were walking home,
Their bodies satisfied with work on the farm,
The greenish porcelain of evening sky
Inverted over them, Sheffield used to lie
At the other end of the single-track railway line.
They gulped up water from a bucket when they got inside
And hung their caps on nails in the kitchen door,
Striking sparks with their boots from the stone floor,
But on the living room wall were fading photos
Of men at work in smart unsuitable clothes
Whose country cousins they were. These wonderful men
For ever proved the boss was wrong again,
For ever were kept awake or sent to sleep
By a steam hammer, lodging in Weedon Street,
For ever framed in gilt hung looking down
On children being mardy or manking about;
And though the terraced houses where they lived
Make way for multi-storey flats to rise
As monuments to socialism on the hills,
Their memory is only imperfectly erased:
Works chimneys remain by which they lived to die,
Their muzzles still smoking from killing the summer sky.