Barearse Boy - Softcover

Jon Tait's family has lived in the hills of the Anglo-Scottish borders for at least six hundred years. He is a direct descendent of a notorious seventeenth-century family of Reivers who lived in Barearse near Scotland, rustling cattle, burning farms and putting their neighbors to the sword. In this modern take on Scott's Border Minstrelsy, Tait follows the Reiver people as they are forced from their rural heartlands into the industrial and post-industrial North East of England in search of work. Written with the lawless spirit as well as the dourness and defiance of the original Border Ballads, Barearse Boy is as rooted in the purple heather moorlands of the borders as the writer himself.

Jon Tait was born in Ashington, Northumberland in 1972. Barearse Boy is his first full collection of poems. He has previously published two chapbooks of poetry Midnight at the Snake Motel and Lucky to Get Nowt and a novel, First Plane Home. He is a postman and union rep in Carlisle, where he now lives.