William Martin, Marratide: Selected Poems

“I draw a snake upon your back ...” It’s one of many lines derived from children’s games that lives on in William Martin’s poetry. Yet it also leapt of the page when I read it in Anna Marra Missa, one of the verses included in Marratide, a newly-published anthology to mark Martin’s centenary year.

In a collection of poetry that drills through layers of north-eastern history and folklore, that one tied directly to my own childhood. As kids, growing up over the road from Martin’s home in the shadow of Tunstall Hill, Sunderland, that was part of the ritual when setting up games of hide-and-seek. His own children were grown up by the time I was in primary school, but it’s entirely possible that the line was handed down from them in our streetlore. I knew little of William Martin, poet; for me he was Uncle Bill (in Sunderland, any familiar adult becomes uncle or aunty regardless of family connection), a kindly figure in the house opposite. Discovering his poetry in adult life throws back flickers of my own past. The gatepost where we counted down those hide-and-seek games is gone; does the game and its verse live on among today’s children?

That blurring of eras lies at the heart of Martin’s work. There are frequent cries of “Cockerooso” taken from the mouths of kids playing in Silksworth streets. In those cries “generations hop across”; monks and miners linked by the ley lines of the Wiramutha Helix, a journey where the mythical and the day-to-day intersect on a serpentine path through Wearside past and present.

The language, too, blends Mackem dialect with Latinate flourish. Anna Marra Missa comes from the Hinny Beata collection of 1987; on Wearside, “marra” and “hinny” are terms of solidarity and affection. These were ideas nurtured from Martin’s earliest days growing up in the mining community of New Silksworth, steeped in the socialism and Methodism of the Durham coalfield.

Yet this is no provincial accent, to be filed under local colour with a pat on the head. If Martin’s wartime experiences steered him away from religion, his time in India encouraged his spirituality. His coinage of Marradharma takes parallel concepts of social responsibility, of mutual respect and solidarity, and melds them into a single idea. “What Kingdom without common feasting?” he asks, and much of his work explores that question.

Some of the answers are found in the annual ritual of the Miners Gala, a summertime jamboree in Durham. Martin’s life encompassed the eventual decline and fall of the coalfield, and he witnessed the Big Meeting change from a gathering of fellow miners to a remembrance of a communal heritage. The Gala, and the modern-day pilgrimage from pit village to cathedral door, resonates through his work. In Marratide, from Crackenrigg, published in 1983, the day is unforgettably etched as “Brass and banners and pint froth” as pit bands parade through steep streets to gather on the field for common feasting. In the later Durham Beatitude the tone is more sombre, reflecting the 1951 Easington Colliery disaster, and the scene is recast as dignified memorial: “They that mourn / Came here in July / Field blessed with banners / Thronged comforting hush.”

Like much of Martin’s work, Durham Beatitude is intensely local. But there’s also a Blakean fervour, albeit building its Jerusalem from the depths of the mines rather than the “dark Satanic mills.” In a region that was once the cultural lighthouse of the Dark Ages – the saints buried in Durham that oversee the Gala lend weight to that claim – a sense of seeking light from darkness, of clawing black diamonds from the depths, is never far away. Writing during Thatcher’s assault on Britain’s heavy industries, Martin hoists a banner for community and the belief that we are greater together than apart. “I is not here,” he writes of Gala day; ego overlooked, a call for collectivism to be heralded once more in his centenary year.

Marratide: Selected Poems was compiled and edited by Peter Armstrong and Jake Morrison-Campbell. It’s available here for £14.99, published by Bloodaxe Books. The collection spans William Martin’s career, from his earliest pamphlets and fragments to extracts from Lammas Alanna, his final published collection in 2000. In addition to the new anthology, a fascinating collection of recordings of Martin reading his work is now online here.