These poems are spread over a year of the poet's life. Sometimes with anger, sometimes with regret, often with wit, they describe the poet's own ageing, alongside the decline of the Northern town in which he lives and from which he regularly escapes into the harsh landscape of the Pennines. "Northern Powerhouse" is no description for the North as it is described, and lived, here: this is a country of dying towns surrounded by magnificent scenery, inhabited by people who live hard lives, enlivened only by a grim and fatalistic humour.