The Singing Cobbles

What stories do the streets remember? What fragments of our past remain beneath our feet as the world moves on around us?

In The Singing Cobbles, Leeds-based poet and writer Anne Iredale takes us on a poignant, imaginative journey through the streets and memories of a working-class childhood, into the complexities, contradictions and shifting landscapes of modern life.

With warmth, wit and a wonderfully playful ear for language, Anne captures the extraordinary in the everyday. Her poems explore the joys and sorrows of ordinary lives, the absurdities of human behaviour, the resilience that carries us through difficult times, and the memories that continue to shape who we are.

Drawing on personal experience while ranging freely into the world of imagined characters and miniature stories, Anne brings a rich cast of voices and lives vividly to the page. There is nostalgia here, but never sentimentality; humour alongside tenderness; and an eye for the unexpected detail that can transform the familiar into something fresh and surprising.

From the cobbled streets of yesterday to the uncertainties of a changing world, these poems invite us to look again at the places we inhabit, the people we encounter and the experiences that connect us.

Thoughtful, moving, often playful and always alive to the possibilities of language, The Singing Cobbles is a celebration of memory, imagination and the wonderfully complicated business of being human.