In the 1960s, he was writing about growing up in a working-class area in England's industrial north, and the mood and atmosphere of these early poems—dour and bolted-down—make the details ring as true as a hammer coming down on an anvil. Mr Connor feels both trapped and enthralled to have been, as he himself writes, “the sociable, lonely poet,/a rueful one-man sect,/in an ugly, ignorant city—his God-given subject.”