Review - Sarah Wimbush - STRIKE
Sarah Wimbush is a Yorkshire poet. Her first collection, Shelling Peas with My Grandmother in the Gorgiolands, was published with Bloodaxe in 2022. She has published two prize-winning pamphlets: The Last Dinosaur in Doncaster (Smith | Doorstop, 2021), and Bloodlines (Seren, 2020) which shortlisted in the Michael Marks Awards. Her poems have recently appeared in Acumen, Poetry Wales, Magma, Poetry Salzburg Review and in the celebratory Plath anthology, After Sylvia, (Nine Arches Press, 2022). A fan of poetry-film, her collaborative piece, The Pencil Sharpener, shortlisted in the 2021 Ó Bhéal Poetry-film Competition. Sarah's poetry focuses on family, identity, and heritage, including marginalised communities such as Gypsies and Travellers, coal-mining villages, and the miners' strike 1984/5. She is a recipient of a Northern Writers' Award and an Authors' Foundation Grant from the Society of Authors.
On a personal level Sarah is also a member of our poetry group Read To Write in Doncaster, where she has been a guest reader and workshop facilitator.
STRIKE has a deceptively simple premise. Find some photographs taken during the miner’s strike on 1984/85 and write poems inspired by them. However writing really good poems and putting them together with the photographs in a really affordable collection is not simple, but this what Sarah has achieved.
This is a difficult subject for anyone who grew up in the coal communities and particularly if you lived through them on the front lines. Villages like Shirebrook in Derbyshire were ripped apart, from being a community strong in solidarity, in culture and in togetherness to one that was left shattered, with trust abandoned and a great big hole where the colliery and its heart used to be. I was lucky. I hadn’t joined the previous five generations of my family to work in the industry. They encouraged me to get away and to find my own place in the world. Not that I would have lasted five minutes in the pit - my forefathers were made of physically and mentally stronger stuff than me and I never lost respect for them, no matter how many degrees I got. When the strike came I was living and working in Birmingham and watched all but the end of it on TV, getting the full force of the media’s government driven message. By the time I came back to Derbyshire, it was all but over. Not just the strike, we knew the industry was finished and that particular government had no interest in helping the communities left to rot and the scars would probably outlive the people who were, and still are, there.
I had seen some of Sarah’s mining poems before. The poem Markham Main that introduces the collection, the prose-poem Our Language, and STOP all appear in earlier publications. From Markham Main
Gaffers, fathers, brothers - an hour at the club with a pint. Go over the end again, and again. How they were the last by three days to stay out in Yorkshire. How they'd 'gu back tomorra'
I knew that Sarah knew this community, but that she could also write about it without patronising or glamourising it.
So when I found out she was creating a full collection about the strike I knew she had the background and poetic skill to pull it off.
Ekphrastic writing (using an image to inspire your prose or poetry) is an interesting challenge. Do you describe the image? Take pieces of it? Allude to it? Or just let it inspire a more generic or higher intellectual level of response? Well, all of these can be found in STRIKE.
There is an harder poetic edge to STRIKE throughout that is only occasionally seen in her previous work, and the subject matter justifies this. It is a testament to her ability that she has been able to ramp up the harshness of the work to meet the needs of the subject.
The trajectory of the collection matches the trajectory of the strike. At the start we have rallies, strength, the celebration of the support of the miners’ wives and of people around the country. Badges and banners. But then we have Orgreave. Deaths on the picket lines. Strikebreakers and the fracturing of unity. And finally, defeat.
I’m finding it hard to select enough examples to accurately represent the collection in terms of content and style but here goes. Firstly, from Queen Coal
These are the women who darn and damn and bide. They know the exact price of fish, spend their days as overlockers and home-helps and kallin by the gate and nights at Cooplands in nasty green hair nets.
From Thatcher
Her Majesty of backcomb and pearls. Blonde bombshell, iron-handbagged and twice the man. No milk monitor here; eyes sapphire and Caligula, hoarder of bituminious and DSS payments.
From Enemy
Enemy waving tenners Enemy raking it in Enemy living next door Enemy as kin
I’ve read the collection a few times and I keep finding new things to admire and other depths to appreciate. This was a brutal time and, in the end, nobody won. Thatcher may have broken the NUM and closed down an industry she felt had no place in the modern world but something cracked within the core of our society during her time and we’ve never recovered. This is exposed by STRIKE, which shows (in word and photo) but very rarely tells.
Finally, I’m not sure about copyright (I’ll remove it if required) but I do think I need to show how the book is laid out. Here’s the double page of one of the most iconic images from that time and Sarah’s poem.
Put together beautifully by Stairwell Books at a mere £15 this is a remarkable collection of poems that also provides the reader a brilliant collection of photographs that summarise that era, and does full justice to the people and places of the mining communities.