Didsbury lives in Hull and has published three books: The Butchers of Hull (1982), The Classical Farm (1987), and That Old-Time Religion (1994). The first two are brilliant. The basic method is of fixing reality before interpretative frames have classified and categorized it, isolating primary features, and recording these features in a serial way, such that multiple possible interpretations are possible during the course of the poem, and the interpretative framework, invisible and eliminated, paradoxically stands out starkly as if read by infra-red light. These are poems about cognition, unable to supply sentiment or morality. That is, the same basic method as with Christopher Middleton and Roy Fisher. The release of information across time is the essential part of the poem's design. Any discussion of ostranenie will shed light on Didsbury.
Sometimes the scene is bizarre and inexplicable: in 'The Drainage', a Yorkshire parish is bound by frost, a man goes round cutting the skins off cows and stitching them together. 'The Rain' is an account in estranged, non-literal Northern dialect of the creation myth in the Prose Edda. He is interested in the secret life of objects:
Edifying Lectures at Dusk
float in and out of the windows like paper planes,
the kind whose bombload is held to resemble
the light reflected from jams in the pantry,
pear halves stacked like syrup in jars,
the breath of apples in the air raid shelter
and the sound of the clock in the hall that is ticking like fruit.
and we can link this to his second profession as an archaeologist, where inanimate and dumb objects are arranged in patterns which provoke a conceptual breakthrough into speaking and becoming evidence.
One wonders why he was so much later than his contemporaries in starting, when access to print was easier in the Sixties than at any time before or since; why did he publish his first book at the age of 36, and why did he evolve so much out of touch with his real contemporaries, although his eventual technique is so easy to relate to the major poets of the sixties? I believe, from an informant, that the answer is that Didsbury was only reading the "mainstream" poets, and it took him a very long time to work out that they were uninteresting; he wrote poems in this style, which he has now thrown away. Because the good poetry has been made invisible, this kind of delay and frustration has undoubtedly happened to thousands of people.