Winter Migrants opens with Tom Pickard's prize-winning sequence 'Lark & Merlin', an erotic pursuit over the hills and fells of the poet's Northern-English homeland. Stotting clough and gill in sneaping winds, leaping burns by backlit larches, waves of sleek grass skiffing mist ... here, says the poet, 'the weather is overseer'. The borders between body and landscape, desire and object, blur in the mammal heat of pursuit, of a lover, of a self, insatiable and unresolvable. There follows a selection from the Fiends Fell Journals, a haibun or poetry-diary, composed over the decade Pickard lived alone on the wind-blown North Pennines. Short poems dedicated to friends and acerbic, satirical poems lend the second half of Winter Migrants a playful warmth and tonic mischief. As the collection draws to a close, the poems return to the familiar horizon of Solway Firth, the estuary 'where winter migrants gather in long black lines', and the world, cooled now both inside and out, quells: a curlew gifts its 'estuary echo'; gulls make a 'confetti flurry' above the shoreline; and clouds, once pale and flitting, pour purple and gold, 'a mercury whisper of tipped-in light'. // 'I am an old admirer of Tom Pickard's poetry and believe as does Basil Bunting that he is one of the most live and true poetic voices in Great Britain.' (Allen Ginsberg)

Tom Pickard was born in 1946 in Newcastle upon Tyne and educated in Blakelaw, where he gained a last at Cowgate Secondary Modern. He has cobbled together a career ever since, between periods as a welfare claimant, as a writer, labourer, bookdealer, curator, dyker, driver, performer, librettist, oral historian, and producer-director of film and radio documentaries. A lifelong counter-culture figure, in 1964, aged eighteen, Pickard cofounded Morden Tower, a live poetry venue in Newcastle, hosting poets such as Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, and Basil Bunting. In 1973 he moved to London, where he occasionally worked as a market trader and writer/director of radio, film and television documentaries, including We Make Ships (1988) and The Shadow and the Substance (1994). Pickard has collaborated throughout his career with musicians, film-makers and poets. He is the recipient of a Gold Medal from the New York International Film and TV Festival, and the 2011 Bess Hokin Prize for poetry. His publications include High on the Walls (1968), Guttersnipe (1971), fuckwind (1999), The Dark Months of May (2004), Ballad of Jamie Allan (2007) and More Pricks Than Prizes (2010).