Geoff Hattersley’s Collected Poems brings together over three decades of work, mapping a singular voice grounded in working-class experience, dark wit, and sharply observed detail. From the everyday surrealism of factory life and Yorkshire pubs to moments of intimacy, grief, and wry reflection, Hattersley’s poetry resists pretension while retaining emotional precision. The poems are marked by their clarity of tone, their unflinching engagement with social realities, and their ability to move between satire and tenderness without losing balance. This is a comprehensive and compelling portrait of a poet deeply attuned to the texture of ordinary life.
 
PRAISE for Geoff Hattersley:
What a privilege  to wander once more into the county of Hattersley; here’s Nev, just as I remembered him, here’s these pubs and supermarkets and kitchens again rendered as crucibles of beautiful language, here’s Geoff’s singular way of looking at the world, remade for the contemporary moment.
   — Andrew McMillan
 
Geoff Hattersley's work has been distinguished for a long time by its lethal direct address, knife-turning humour and attention to character. In Instead of an Alibi, his cast of skinheads, solo drinkers, failed musicians, gentle giants - not to mention 'the ugliest gravedigger / in the whole of England' - are completely alive and realised, in poems of tenderness and human connection which are also sheer knockabout fun. This is vintage Hattersley.
   — John Clegg
 
The South Yorkshire poet Geoff Hattersley is in lively form in his new collection, Instead of an Alibi, the first since his 2012 pamphlet, Outside the Blue Hebium. Shifting between the merriment and sadness of ordinary extraordinary things, it delivers a poetry of intensely English attitudes and voices, including a sparky sequence of pub conversations in Yorkshire dialect, In t’George. Hattersley has a gift for comedy, and the jokes, as in this week’s poem, often have political edge. In the Springtime is from the third part of the collection, a largely urban and daffodil-free selection of Covid-19 pandemic poems bearing the resolutely non-romantic title, Lonely as a Crowd.
   — Carol Rumens
 
There is real gusto in his work as well as a manic but controlled humour. He can evoke odd or unnerving states of mind, enigmas, private terrors, domestic emergencies, with techniques or ways of looking at things which seem designed to give the familiar a good shake. Cheeky, imaginative, cerebral, witty – it is poetry with a lot to say for itself
   — Douglas Dunn
 
Not many other contemporary poets can represent the rhythms and tensions of our times as successfully as Geoff Hattersley.
   — Jim Burns
 
Geoff Hattersley’s poetry is at the forefront of a surrealism of the provinces. Its landscape is usually urban South Yorkshire, sometimes real, sometimes of the mind – but, as Ian McMillan has remarked, ‘maybe they’re the same thing’. Influences as diverse as Frank O’Hara, Günter Grass, Bob Dylan, Charles Bukowski and Lenny Bruce fuel terse, aphoristic records of the grotesqueries of everyday living in the age of unreason. The laconic, the passive, the reticent and the comic become the only ways of speaking truly about the 1980s and early 1990s.
   — David Kennedy
 
ABOUT Geoff Hattersley:
Geoff Hattersley published and performed poetry from 1984. His work has been widely published and has been used as part of syllabuses in schools, universities, and with The Open University. He edited The Wide Skirt Press from 1986 until 1998, publishing 30 issues of the magazine and 24 books and pamphlets. He lived in Huddersfield with his wife Jeanette. Geoff passed away in 2024.