Marratide: Selected Poems, William Martin, Bloodaxe
William Martin (1952–2010) was born in the mining village of New Silksworth, then in County Durham, and later moved to Sunderland where he spent the last 50 years of his life. During the second world war he worked as a radio technician in the RAF, based near Jodhpur, where he was inspired by Eastern religious and philosophical traditions, After the war, he started out as a gas fitter and then began working in the audiology department of Sunderland Royal Infirmary working his way up to head of department. His creative life began as a painter but from the mid-1960s he turned to poetry. He published five collections from 1971 to 2000 including two with Bloodaxe.
Marratide brings together poems from Cracknrigg (1983), and Hinny Beata (1987) from Taxus Press; and Marra Familia (1993) and Lammas Alanna (2000) from Bloodaxe. In this edition, two informative introductory essays by editors Peter Armstrong and Jake Morris-Campbell discuss the life and poetry of William Martin. The splendid cover picture is taken from The Book of Kells, c 800 AD and is complemented inside by a further series of black and white illustrations which include the covers to his other publications. Audio recordings made by Katrina Porteous of William Martin reading his poems and singing can be accessed via a QR code that is provided in the book. Helpful notes on most of the poems are given to the reader at the end.
Martin’s verse is rigorously spare and quite original to the extent that it takes time for the reader to acclimatise to the particularities of his uniqueness. His poems are grounded in the north-east mining communities and the region’s topology, history and Celtic mythology. The occasional use of Pitmatic, otherwise known as pit talk, the language or dialect used by miners, coupled with his forays into Welsh and Latin, add colour to his verse.
Another striking aspect to his work is his inclusion of children’s songs arising out of localised street games, most of which are now in danger of being lost to oblivion. Running through all of this is his interest in local stories such as the one about the Lambton Worm, a so-called monster that terrorised medieval Wearside, as well as Anglo-Saxon history and literature linked to the north-east of England. There are references to the Venerable Bede and St Cuthbert and there is a poem whose sentiments run close to the Old English elegy, ‘The Seafarer’. Recurring motifs such as the one about the three ships, redolent of the jaunty 17th century carol: ‘I saw three ships come sailing in …’ are never far from a number of his poems, adding to their overall musicality. Given that a lot of these aspects are fused together in compact form, the sense of each poem is often fragmentary and, at times, hard to follow.
The selection opens with the short poem, ‘When May Be Out’:
Tid Mid Miseray
Carlin Palm
Paste-Egg Day
The first line refers to the traditional names for three of the Sundays during Lent, used as a mnemonic in an Old English folk rhyme. The names are derived from the opening words of the Latin hymns and psalms historically sung on those days. The remaining Sundays in the rhyme refer to the eating of Carlin peas in northern England, Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday.
Biblical references, sometimes oblique, occur throughout Martin’s work. In ‘The Round Dance’, for example, the lines “He asked for a fish / Will beach-lore offer a stone?’’ comes from the Gospels of Matthew and Luke whose passages use this rhetorical question to highlight God’s generosity.
‘Hen Meneu The Old Bush’ is one of many poems that at several points break into song:
One for the holdfast stem
Two for the flood
Three for the rosy babes
Shrived by her blood
Here’s another one. This time it is a poem called ‘Song’:
How many miles to Babylon
Threescore and ten
Can I get there by candlelight
Yes and back again
Here’s a beck then and here’s a boo
Open your gates and let us all through
Open your gates and let us all through
Martin was very much a poet of place. The poems in ‘Bairnseed’, for example, reference 26 streets within the walls of the original mining village of Silksworth. In the sequence ‘Wiramutha Helix’ there are references to historical and geographical sites such as New Silksworth and Silksworth Colliery, Maiden Paps (the local name for the Tunstall Hills), Boldon, and Warden Law, which is connected with the Dun Cow Legend and is reputed to be the last resting place of St Cuthbert before Durham.
For all his compactness, Martin’s poems can also be lyrical. Here is ‘The magic apple tree’ from ‘Images from Samuel Palmer’:
I walked in this valley
Of the magic apple tree
I talked to a piping shepherd
Stooked corn tumbling down
I ate a red apple there
Full branches bending over
I touched the steeple pointer
Gold-tipped among barton ricks
Martin’s voice is a distinctive one. Whether he is writing about pulley-wheels and pit props, Cariadwen (The White Goddess) or Conachair (The highest summit on Hirta, St Kilda), hopscoch or cockerooso, or the Romanesque Kelloe Cross in the Norman church of St Helen, Kelloe, Co Durham, his poems range far and wide and are full of energy and vision.
