YOU can think of it as a poetical history or as history served with generous helpings of poetry.

Either way Spirit and Emotion, Mabel Ferrett's account of 40 years of the Pennine Poets group, edited by Pauline Kirk, works and is an outstanding success.

No-one with an interest in poetry could fail to appreciate the quality of the sample works from many and varied poets, introduced as their part is told in the story of a group of poets who, with their collective hand-to-mouth struggle learned to inspire and support each other.

On a parochial note, there are many Huddersfield and district names among Pennine poetry's legion of honour, some still with us, some well deserving of remembrance.

Credit for starting the group goes to Joan Lee, first of West Vale and then of Luddendenfoot, with informal meetings first at her home and then at Elland library.

In fact the library connection with the group is strong. Mabel Ferrett reports that Stanley Dibnah, when Kirklees head librarian, offered that Kirklees Council would take on their magazine Pennine Platform and pay all expenses, Mabel - perhaps wisely - refused, preferring to retain complete independence.

Another major contributor was Ian Emberson, music librarian at Huddersfield library, who contributed fine illustrations as well as fine poems.

Many of these poets were marked with many talents. Jane Wilson, of Leeds, was a Holly Bank college teacher as well as a playwright.

Laurie Stead, former Examiner jazz columnist, compiled the Radio Leeds series of songs and poems called Appleshine Glows.

Perhaps the most amazing of all was the late Dr Stephen Henderson-Smith, who also played the violin, was a prolific writer to the Examiner letters column, a frequent orator at the Market Cross, invited the poets to a regular Christmas party as his Lindley home - and still found time to be a GP.

Then there was the Brighouse artist Stanley Chapman, who contributed no poetry but gave the group their fighting cock symbol, as well as pictures of Yorkshire abbeys.

Mabel Ferrett is herself a novelist and local historian as well as a long-serving editor of the Platform, while Pauline Kirk is an author and performance poet..

* Spirit and Emotion. Forty years of Pennine Poets by Mabel Ferrett, edited by Pauline Kirk. £12.50 is published by Fighting Cock Press, of York. It should be available via bookshops. Quote ISBN 0-906744-28-8.