A BLACKBURN-born poet has returned to his roots with a collection of poems that is inspired by the town.

The award-winning poet Mark Ward has just published Thunder Alley, Sonnets and other Poems, which explores contemporary Blackburn, as well as the Blackburn of his youth.

The former St Edmund Arrowsmith - now St Bede's RC High - pupil left the town in 1980, and went on to work and travel around the world.

His former jobs include roles on Alaskan radio, on a tuna boat and building film sets in Africa, and working for a production comp-any out in New Zealand.

Published on three different cont-inents he has written numerous collections of poetry and prose, most recently Used Rhymes and A Guide to Historic Haworth and the Brontes.

Thunder Alley, which was launched at the Vegetarian Cafe in Blackburn, was written over two years, during which time Mark won an Arts Council writer's award to help fund it.

It was the latest in a series of awards. Mark, 46, who has been resident at The Wordsworth Trust in Grasmere for the last eight years, said: "Thunder Alley is something I've wanted to write for a long time, and I'm delighted that I've been able to return to the North West to publish and launch the book.

"I've been all around the world, but here's no place quite like it."

Mark, whose family still live in Revidge, said: "The landscape has changed a lot, both physically and socially.

"Northern industrial towns have had to reinvent themselves when the industry went."

Many of the poems in Thunder Alley - named after a former town centre street - refer to characters from his Revidge childhood.

"The book's foreword by the former Words-worth Trust arts officer Richard Stanton says: "It is about specific places and people, and everybody's mind, a book about the private tragedies and triumphs of a life."