Alan Prout – Poet

Each month we invite you to get to know one of our customers a little better. This month we introduce you to Alan Prout. Alan is a sociologist, writer, academic and more recently a poet. Alan holds Professorships from a number of UK universities as well as a doctorate from Linköping University in Sweden. Alan is a keen hillwalker and will be taking his McNair shirt on a planned trek to the summit of Mount Mulhacén in the Sierra Nevada, which at 3482 metres is the highest peak in Spain. Whilst Alan is most famous for his academic work and important contribution to the understanding of childhood, his poetry set in the Colne Valley is gaining critical acclaim.

Alan will be launching his new book “Then Become” Saturday 8th June. The timing of the launch serendipitously coincides with the start of the first ever Woven Festival which celebrates and honours our region’s unique industrial textile heritage. We thought it fitting to cite one of Alan’s poems which is dedicated to his father who worked in Globe Mills in our home of Slaithwaite.

Northern light

Look at this. Like silk, he always used to say,
when folding worsted lengths he’d helped to make,
his job to know how much red and of which shade
goes into peaty brown, or orange blued to gritstone grey.

What you need, he used to say, is to see as others do,
fixed and framed by a high window, fingers combing wool,
shuttling through a million tones and hues,
in a Northern light, steady across the stapled day.

Copyright Alan Stanley Prout, 2019

“Then Become” will be available through Half Moon Books.