Tom Pickard's Ballad of Jamie Allan recounts the true adventures of an eighteenth-century gypsy musician who lived on the English?Scottish Borders and died in Durham jail, serving a life sentence for stealing a horse.

As does Paul McCartney. This is a true crime story with a happy ending. "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."

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 ...

Their heart is clarity, spoken. Why shouldn't the music lead and the heart follow-and mind be the wonder of their witness? This is a great poetry made of such common life, each word a step along the way"-Robert Creeley.

For Tom Pickard poetry is a free, and freeing, space.

Poetry. In FIENDS FELL, Tom Pickard charts a single year out of a decade spent on a bare hilltop near the English-Scottish border, with the roaring wind as his only guide.

In part a chronicle of misfortune and heartbreak, The Dark Months of May tells of life on the run.