Some Reviews of Andrew’s work:

GHOSTS OF A LOW MOON

I particularly admire Oldham’s poem ‘Captain Webb’s Relations’. Webb was the first man to swim the channel and he came from Dawley in Shropshire. Oldham brings his admiration of Webb and his imagination together and sets the poem in a Leeds pub:

A morse code of beer, hot chips & black waves that reach us here

He turns the pub into a ship by clever conceit, sustained throughout the poem in a way that summons up a nightmarish scene in which Webb is fighting the waves ‘his lungs full / fathom five’ (he drowned attempting Niagara Falls). Webb was a merchant seaman before he became a professional swimmer; Oldham reflects this in his poem beautifully. There is indeed something ship-like about old-fashioned pubs with the gleaming rails and curved bars. The poem is a hymn for Webb, for endeavour, for the wives who wait and suffer. Webb is one of the ghosts of the title. This poem is a tour de force. - Angela Topping at Stride Magazine

An ambitious, extensive and surreal collection of dreams, childhood memories and strange, fractured love affairs, which culminates in a tragic-comic journey through modern America…It is an ambitious, skillful poet than can range through love, childhood, Costa Coffee and Las Vegas and find a common thread of human suffering - Andrew Michael Hurley, Lancashire Writing Hub/They Eat Culture

One of the brightest and most memorable British poetic voices of today - Vince Gotera, Editor, North American Review.

An impressive collection, moving with ease from what might appear at first glance to be unmediated social realism to moments of great lyricism, and incorporating humour, pathos and crystal-sharp observation with considerable skill – Charles Lambert