Books by Keith Howden

Keith Howden was born near Burnley in 1932. He is married, with three children. After National Service and work as a laboratory assistant, he taught English and modern European fiction with a major interest in 'the text as event' at Nottingham Trent University. Among his many poetry pamphlets are Joe Anderson, Daft Jack's Ideal Republics, Pauper Grave, Hanging Alice Nutter and Barlow Agonistes. He has published three full-length collections, Marches of Familiar Landscape (Peterloo 1978), Onkonkay (Peterloo (1984) and Jolly Roger (Smokestack 2012). Recently, with his son, the composer Matthew Howden, he has completed two poetry music collaborations, with accompanying discs: The Matter of Britain (PRE Rome 2009) and Barley Top (Redroom 2013).

It has proved difficult to separate the usually melodramatically rendered life from a creative achievement that, despite a further number of successfully achieved canvases, depends essentially on the series, Landscapes with Handless Man, a linked sequence of large canvases (all approximately six feet by six feet) created in the last years of life before (as he perhaps unbelievably claimed) the events they illustrate and his later incarceration, after a charge of murder. in a Mental Institution. After the first Exhibition of the Landscapes, Matthews achieved a short-lived cult status which to some smaller extent has continued to the present. The material of the Landscapes is apparently an allegorical interpretation and a reconstruction/prediction (again there must be some doubt) of his own life in which curiously stylised industrial or moorland backgrounds hold recognisable and, though the treatment is hardly realistic, recurrent figures, animals, birds and 'metaphoric objects.'