Matthew Paul reviews STRIKE by Sarah Wimbush (Stairwell Books, 2024)
The powers-that-be have invariably had a fraught relationship with northern England, including the Great Heathen Army’s invasion of 865 and subsequent Danelaw, William the Bastard’s Harrying of the North in 1069–70, the savage putting-down of the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536, right up to the most recent Conservative government’s desultory attempts at what they called ‘levelling up’. In current collective memory, the most egregious example of differential treatment remains Margaret Thatcher’s planned destruction of the coalmining industry and communities in 1984–85, as revenge for the miners’ actions in 1974 in bringing down Heath’s government, in which Thatcher had served as Education Secretary. Although a substantial number of coalfields existed outside the North of England – in Kent, Scotland, South Wales and Staffordshire – the largest concentrations were in South and West Yorkshire and the East Midlands, and it was the Yorkshire mining communities which arguably bore the bitterest brunt.
To mark the strike’s fortieth anniversary this year, several documentaries, most notably Daniel Gordon’s Strike: an Uncivil War, have been aired, and exhibitions have been staged. However, aside from Gordon’s and Michael Donald’s book accompanying Strike: an Uncivil War, there have been few non-journalistic written responses to mark the milestone. Poetry-wise, SmithǀDoorstop will be publishing a poetry anthology this autumn, but Sarah Wimbush, South Yorkshire born and bred, has got there first. But this is no normal thematic collection. On each verso, one of Strike’s 42 poems responds, either directly or tangentially, to a photograph on the recto. So this is ekphrastic poetry. But Wimbush’s memories of the strike, and her thorough research (evidenced by helpful notes at the back of the book), mean that more often than not the photos provide starting-points, springboards, for poems which transcend the visual images.
Wimbush’s memories of the strike, and her thorough research mean that more often than not the photos provide starting-points, springboards, for poems which transcend the visual images
The collection is ordered in a rough chronology of the strike and its immediate aftermath, and opens impressively with a rolling, rhythmic prose poem, ‘Our Language’, which gives voice to the miners and their communities as a whole: “It’s friendship. It’s fuck the bastards. This is the tune of haulage boys and shot-firers and Elvis impersonators, their legs smashed to bits at the bottom of shafts and the woman who feed everyone’s children.”
STRIKE includes a trio of pen-portraits of major players – ‘Kinnock’, who “whispers ballot into the blindness / of those who wind the gears”, and, of course, ‘Thatcher’, recalled with bitterness, unsurprisingly but also laconically:
Her Majesty
of backcomb and pearls.
Blonde bombshell, iron-handbagged
and twice the man.
That of ‘Scargill’, though, is, rightly, the most nuanced and therefore the most successful; he’s freeze-framed at the outset as the fiery orator leading the NUM:
The dictionary is his Bible. Full stop.
He knows boys who were crushed
with only a handful of adjectives in their tipple tins.
The collection really hits its stride when Wimbush writes, beautifully, about the role of women in supporting the striking men, in ‘Queen Coal’, a stand-out list-poem of sorts, full of affection, admiration and telling detail:
Coal queens. Pit-brow lasses. Lionesses.
Most can knit. Several have no mice in their cellars
but plenty of rats, girls trapped inside the ring
of a teacup, pallid uncles, dead hearths –
some took a bloody nose, some fought back.
Here, as elsewhere in the book, Wimbush achieves the feat of leaving the reader in no doubt as to where her sympathies lie while also allowing her understandable emotional response to underscore, rather than suffocate, the poem’s effects.
A later list-poem, ‘People who support the Miners’, more obviously invites the reader to infer those emotions, giving a lie to Thatcher’s claims that the strike was unsupported outside the mining communities:
People in vardos and people in tiaras.
People donating potatoes to soup kitchens
by the tonne every Tuesday.
Dockers, rockers and people on overtime.
[…]
Queer people, beer people, God people,
the Afro-Caribbean Centre, Springsteen,
The Sikh Society … Father Christmas.
People who are children of the people who lived
and died on the blunt end of a pick.
Wimbush is wise enough, and talented enough poetically, to know that this mixed-up miscellany, with its constant surprises, needs only to be listed, without commentary.
Of the poems which provide more direct responses to the photos, ‘Miner running towards a field at Orgreave’ is the most complete in how it imagines the life of the miner – who’s pictured running from mounted, baton-wielding policemen – outside the frame as well as within:
Jogging, it seems. He could be catching the last bus
after a night on the lash in Donny town, running
in the slow-mo way some people never seem to rush.
Then again, he could be a boxer on a training regime
along Filey Bay. Or, shirtless and unusually tanned,
having a knock-about with kids on the street.
Wimbush largely addresses the impact of violence in the strike obliquely. The (in)famous photo by John Harris of Lesley Boulton lifting an arm to ward off a blow from another mounted policeman inspires a poem notable for its leanness and staccato rhymes, and for what it doesn’t say about the circumstances:
The stave, the stare,
The road, the air,
her bead necklace,
the horse’s breath
[…]
the space between
what was and what
might have been
in white and black –
As Wimbush hints, Boulton, engaged in helping an injured miner, was saved from a coshing to the head by being pulled back at the last second, but the propaganda value of the photo was immeasurable: “The face that haunts / a thousand pits.”
Wimbush summarises the cost in lives as a result of the strike and its conflicts in ‘Death by Strike’, the collection’s closing poem:
Strike is a fist beating fast.
Strike is a dreamcatcher
– he’d got branches in his hand.
Strike is a boy scratching at slack.
Entombment.
The weight of snow.
Powerful though these and its three preceding stanzas are, the note to the poem gives more detail of the victims and is therefore even more moving, and perhaps this is an instance where the poem might have benefited from a loosening of Wimbush’s otherwise commendable restraint. But it’s inevitable in a collection so bold in its ambition that there are some pieces that feel underdeveloped – including ‘Coal Imports’, ‘The Police, The Miners’ Wives, Their Children’ and ‘The Black Hole’ – but they each still have something about them, and that’s partly because Wimbush is careful to vary her forms and points of view. In the villanelle ‘This is the BBC’, for example, Wimbush brilliantly exploits the form’s repetitive nature to execrate BBC TV News’s falsely edited account of the events at Orgreave: “Lies. Lies and more bollocks – / still waiting for Judgement Day. / Record. Rewind. Reverse. / A thud of hooves behind us.”
Wimbush creates poetry which needs to be read on its own terms – by turns emotive, passionate and never less than skilfully rendered
Two poems concerning those who chose not to strike, or to return to work unilaterally, are distinguished by the deployment of commanding couplets, one in the third person and one in the first, though it’s noteworthy that Wimbush eschews the term ‘scab’:
He is Maggie’s Judas.
David Hart’s bankrolled doofus.
[…]
He is a rimmer of the night.
He is a sinner in the fight.
(from ‘Silver Birch’)
The path is blackness and never ending.
The path is my slip and I vote with my feet.
(from ‘Strikebreaker’)
Other highlights include ‘The Flat Cap’, which fancifully but fruitfully extends the metaphor of the titular headgear as artefact through time and space (“Peoples / dock at the Intergalactic Museum keen to see // this strange discovery and our descendants might wonder, / what kind of man might have worn such a thing?”), and another very finely detailed, unflinching and witty poem about the crucial role of women, the marvellously-titled tour de force ‘Our Lady of the Pit Canteen’:
You may have scrubbed a fella’s shoulders
in the pit-head baths
and dressed up as a bunny girl
at Butlin’s for the laugh,
[…]
and gone down at 15
and now you’re coughing up the black,
but I’ll ’ave tha guts for garters
if them dishes aren’t brought back!
It’s in lines like these that Wimbush most productively surpasses the limitations of a project which might all too easily have become a dry historical document. She creates poetry which needs to be read on its own terms – by turns emotive, passionate and never less than skilfully rendered.
Matthew Paul lives in Rotherham and worked as a local government education officer for many years. His first collection, The Evening Entertainment, was published by Eyewear in 2017. He is also the author of two haiku collections, The Regulars (2006) and The Lammas Lands (2015), and is co-writer / editor (with John Barlow) of Wing Beats: British Birds in Haiku (2008), all published by Snapshot Press. Matthew Paul’s blog is here.
