2025 is the centenary year of New Silksworth-born poet William Martin. Marking the occasion, Peter Armstrong and Jake Morris-Campbell have edited an anthology of his work, making a case that the poetry deserves a wider audience.
Martin’s poetic world is a multi-layered place. Ancient pilgrim paths are overlaid with colliery wagonways; ritual can mean the incantation of childhood games or the grand procession of banners. The landscape comes alive, inescapably feminine and fecund: the Maiden Paps of the hillside, the steep-sided coastal denes reimagined as vulvas. Birth and nurturing lies beneath the scars of modernity, amid the transient and shifting it abides and awaits a reconnection.
The lines are drawn most explicitly in Wiramutha Helix, originally published as part of 1987’s Hinny Beata. It’s a powerful piece of psychogeography, tracing a path that coils through Sunderland’s ancient history and recent past. Colliery blurs into a monastery, saints and miners share a route that snakes serpentine around the town. Echoes of myth, echoes of legend, and echoes of a daily walk to work; it’s typical of Martin’s ability to peel back the layers and reveal the depths beneath the familiar.
But don’t assume this is merely provincial poetry. Martin’s vision may be firmly rooted in home soil, but it ranges widely through time and space. Born in Silksworth, to a mining family, his upbringing combined the Durham coalfield virtues of socialism and methodism. Christian faith faded amid wartime experience, yet the same experience reinvigorated an underlying spiritualism. Time served in India opened horizons that continued to broaden throughout his life: Marradharma, a portmanteau coinage alluding to the spiritual dimensions of comradeship, defined one of Martin’s favourite ideas. It reverberates through his verse: “What Kingdom without common feasting?”
Durham Beatitude
That line comes from the Durham Beatitude, a response to the 1951 Easington Colliery disaster and that year’s Miners’ Gala in Durham. Once again, the intensely local – the pit wheels, the soot-black beaches glimpsed through gorse bushes – leads to a greater community. “By the poor for the poor, They taught themselves” tales of shared history, common story as ritual retelling, fresh-stoked rage at the cruelty of the bailiff while perhaps seeking a Blakean Jerusalem hewn from mine rather than mill.
That notion of light from darkness also resonates throughout the collection. We’re in a world – at times – of literal darkness, grubbing below ground for the black diamonds of the coalfield. But we’re also harking back to the so-called Dark Ages, in reality a high watermark of Northumbrian cultural history, an age of literary and cultural advance driven by the great saints buried in Durham Cathedral. For a writer active during the rise of Thatcherism, a proud CND activist and a chronicler of the final days of our coalfields, this feels like a way of kindling hope and accepting the responsibility of preserving the bonds of our communities. Marratide, from 1983’s Crackenrigg, evokes the “brass and banners and pint froth” of Gala Day, revelling in the collective celebration of a community in solidarity. “I is not here,” ego suppressed in common cause. It’s a call that still resonates, and deserves to be heard and celebrated anew.
Marratide: Selected Poems is published by Bloodaxe Books on Thursday, May 22. You can order here for £14.99. 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.
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