Civil Insolencies tells the dramatic story of the battle of Guisborough in North Yorkshire on 16 January 1643, when Parliamentary soldiers defeated Royalist forces in order to secure the crossings over the River Tees. Bob Beagrie attempts to repopulate the vast wastelands of the past with the leaders and the led, Roundheads and Royalists, soldiers and civilians, historical and imagined, exploring ideas of authority and dissent, free speech and faith, propaganda and social division, reaction and revolution. Civil Insolencies looks back on a World Turn'd Upside Down from our own divided and uncertain times.
Set in a post-apocalyptic world after the Second Great Flood, the book presents an ethnographic exploration of a tribal culture's fragmented narratives and lost voices. It delves into their myths, rituals, and customs, revealing the intertwined personal stories of survivors living among the remnants of a collapsed civilization. Through the unsettling tapestry created by Jane Burn and Bob Beagrie, readers encounter the struggles of a community grappling with themes of endurance and extinction in a hauntingly familiar future.
Poetry about the sudden, drastic changes wrought across the country due to Covid and lockdowns: British, but universal. "You will weep.. for/what you always assumed was real.../...places, comings and goings, meetings/and encounters, the uninhibited touch of others." from 'The New Rules to Abide By' "Beagrie's latest collection is recurringly good - recurringly catch-in-the-throat good. With expert twists and turns of language and emotion, he deftly makes us explore the layers of the pandemic's impact. From the punch-in-the-gut poignancy of 'On Touch', through a wonderful complexity of prose poems on our disturbed and disturbing times, this is a collection that will resonate long after Covid fades from our collective memory." - Char March "This collection chronicles the strange legend of the plague year - all distances, absences and grief - bursting with energetic presence, restlessly, defiantly embodied. The poems' diverse robust forms are as if each one were being tested to see if it can bear the weight of all that surreal sudden change. There is strength in such faithful truth-telling, even amid heartbreak, fracture and loss. Bob Beagrie finds words for the unsayable, to ask what will endure in our unknown future." - Linda France
