Downriver is written from a Northern, beer and football, male perspective and contains wide-ranging, vehement poems about working class men's lives, sport and shit but also about cities, painting, being a poet, trains and old Labour politics. Some poems are hard to read, with obscure references, but worth the effort; others are lyrical sequences of songs and ballads.
It means that we can't tolerate
The dim, the daft, the second-rate -
In poetry or politics -
This is the North and not the sticks -
from A Northern Assembly
