The Fig Tree - Coal Mining Issue 1
An anthology of Coal Mining Poems in two parts
Welcome to the first special issue of The Fig Tree, and for it I have chosen the subject of Coal Mining. There will be two parts to this special issue to ensure that as many of the great poems I received can be included without making the email too long. Submissions remain open until April for the second part.
There are a couple of key reasons why I have chosen this subject. Firstly, I come from a village in the former mining area of North Derbyshire where I could see the local colliery from my bedroom window, and the men on both sides of the family had been involved in mining for over 100 years. My grandfather's brother, Jim Hooper, was killed in a mining accident in 1935 and this issue is dedicated to him on the 90th anniversary of his death. I have written a couple of poems about that, and in fact it was during my research on that incident that I was inspired to start writing poetry at the age of 56. One of those poems is included in the call for submissions for this anthology – you can read it here.
Secondly, it is the 40th Anniversary of the end of the Miners' Strike in the UK that lasted for nearly a year before the government broke the strike and triggered the beginning of the end of the industry in the UK. It took 30 years, but now it's gone. I have strong views on this – not because I think it didn't need to be wound down, not least for environmental reasons, but the way it was done and how the communities that were dependent on the pits and everything that flowed from them were left devastated with nearly no support. Even now, when the old collieries are covered by factories, warehouses, housing and country parks, the local economies have never properly recovered.
Mining poetry can cover many facets of the life and times of these communities, and I hoped to get a broad range of poems to put in here. I wasn't disappointed. Mining was dirty and dangerous – even in the 21st Century mining disasters continue to happen in countries where coal is still produced. In the UK this was particularly true prior to nationalisation in 1947 where death was a frighteningly common thing. My great-uncle's death almost went unnoticed in the tide of death and injury across the country day-in, day-out. It had to be a significant disaster (maybe 5, 10 or more deaths) for it to make the national media. So this will clearly be a subject to address. Also, the mining Unions and the Labour movement were at the core of the politics of our mining areas. Fighting for safety, general conditions, wages, pensions and so on. The National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) was at the forefront of the 84-85 strike, and that strike and its consequences are, if you can forgive the pun, another rich seam to plunder. Last year saw the publication of STRIKE, a collection of poems by Sarah Wimbush linked to photographs taken during that period. It's a fantastic collection that I reviewed on my personal blog, here, and I'm delighted that Sarah has supplied two poems from it for The Fig Tree. It was shortlisted for The 2024 Forward Prize for Best Collection and, in my opinion, fully deserved to win. Sarah also writes about the communities outside the pit itself, the children, the women who kept the households going but also ignited their own political flames as strike supporters and the way the industry was portrayed and received in the wider population.
Hopefully the poems we have received and included show this range of subjects, in a range of styles. The format is a little different to usual, with no Featured Poet, and a few extra poems too.
Once again I hope you enjoy reading this issue as much as I did collating it. You are joining around 500 others who are reading the webzine on a regular basis.
Thank you all
Tim Fellows, Editor
Contributors: Nick Allen, Glenn Barker, Jude Brigley, Neil Clarkson, Pete Douglas, Tim Fellows, Ian Harker, David Harmer, Jem Henderson, Charlotte Holm, L.B. Jørgensen, Barrie Kemp, Patrick Lodge, Claire Lynn, Catrin Mari, R.P.Moran, Ian Parks, Jane Sharp, Adam Strickson, Sarah Wimbush and Paul Brough.
Boy Riddlers
No wooden sled or carrot for a nose
only soggy jeans in a frozen maw.
Junior excavators, waist deep
in the whiteout on Cwmcynon tip,
flattened after Aberfan.
Snood-face and lads-lost numb
in Woolworth anoraks; spade-boy,
hoar-eyed and black-blushered
digging for Penrhiwceiber.
Spoil riddled through a shopping basket,
then topping-up the spud-sack
with alchemies of silvered bituminous.
300 million years of compression
dripping through their hands.
Sarah Wimbush
mussels with coal oil
mussels in a hollandaise sauce
with coal oil, pork fat croutons,
dashi
mussels sit squat in the dark bowl
squat in the throat squat
in pale yellow meadow green
the addition of coal oil gives the dish
an unusual robust flavour
the addition of coal oil gives the family
rough heritage dirty hands mucky faces
lungs that cough
black lacework
during the late 19th and most
of the 20th century Armthorpe was known
for its coal mining; the pit Markham Main
the village rises men kiss their sleepy wives
over the tea kettle look in on the children
tossing in bed leave the house pass
fields of lowing cows in the dawn light
during the miners' strike only 34 of Armthorpe's
1300 miners went back to work
the excavation work is backbreaking
men with legs like tree trunks
roots in the earth roots
in the village muscles tight and taut
ache at night
when they retire these giants turn human
shrinking under the bright sunlight
three people from the village of Armthorpe
have died of vCJD, the human form
of mad cow disease, two who lived
on the same street
i’m 11 after opening our presents
we visit my grandparents my uncle
lays on a single bed in the front room
by the christmas tree lit up like a rainbow
curtains wide open
he can’t eat
but screams
the whole way through
our family’s christmas dinner
his cracker sits unopened
the third victim, Adrian Hodgkinson, 24,
lived in Harrogate, dying in 1997
he spent every weekend between 1972
and 1986 at his grandmother's house
in Armthorpe eating Sunday dinner
for the last few months of my uncle’s life
he couldn’t walk
his muscles
wasted
awayJem Henderson
Big Ron – retired Miner
He had three allotments.
When his wife died
he found solace in
what pushed up from the earth.
He didn’t enter growing competitions
though he prized size
and the extent
of what he could give.
Big Ron at the door:
appeared laden with sacks and bags
at all hours, in sun, snow, rain.
Big Ron would never come in.
He preferred to talk about
his wife at the door and on his wide, flat face
a few tears would merge
with beads of sweat,
then, when you thought he was going,
he would talk some more.
Neil Clarkson
Ash and Lime
Ash once fell on the slate roofs
and backyards of terraced rows
when thick black smoke rose
from tall chimneys.
A small boy in a thin school shirt
and cheap sandshoes
jumped a limestone wall
to steal coal from the side
of a railway track,
the frost biting his raw fingertips
shades of black and blue colouring
one side of his hollow cheeks.
Now ash and lime grow here,
a nature reserve has replaced
the redundant industry,
fireplaces blocked with plaster
and papered with tranquil scenes.
Charlotte Holm
Black Seams
On James the Fourth’s Camelot,
his glorious, blingy Forework,
a more mundane, common seam
seeds his towers with black gold.
Those who worked similar veins
deep within the earth’s bowels
will smile to see it here too –
their blood amongst all this pomp –
and smile in understanding
that theirs is the glue all’s built on.
R.P.Moran
Note: James IV’s Forework, built as the entrance to Stirling Castle in the early 1500s, was originally harled with a lime mortar and wash the last few coats of which were mixed with an ochre colourant to give it the ‘King’s Gold’ appearance. This harling has subsequently weathered off leaving the original sandstone building blocks exposed. Some of these blocks have thin veins of coal running across them betraying their origins. They were originally quarried from the local coal mines, particularly in and around Kincardine and Culross where coal has been mined since the 1100s and where the world’s first ever Moat Pit was dug under the sea in the late 1500s.
The Dark
Into the dark we go
hunched, crammed into the cage.
Nowhere to move
as the swift, stomach churning drop
Begins.
The air, changing
density, temperature.
Making us cough,
wiping out eyes as we await the final
Cessation.
Now we can breathe.
The dusty coal black
hawking up the first phlegm,
making jokes, we'd survived
The drop.
Now we walk
stooped, for long miles
under an unknowing populace
to hew the rock and coal.
Sweat.
After first shift
snap tins open for sustenance
while others void their bowels
in small hidden niches.
Brotherhood.
End of shift;
the long walk back to the cage
queueing for your turn, token in hand,
waiting for the baths
And light.
Back to the house,
snap and wife waiting.
Perhaps beer while eating; slaking dust
then to bed
In the dark.
Pete Douglas
Coal
At fifteen, it was my job to set coal alive, to lay
out sticks in patterns, take grey coke from
last night’s immolation, use a paper spill and light,
place the guard and let the draught
hold yesterday’s Daily Herald to a glow.
An easy task to pile on coal. Between the tongs,
a flaky slice of anthracite, black as my father’s
boots, shiny as a giant Victorian jewel. Once, it split
to show a perfect fern before it gleamed
and burned a forest fire. I knew coal’s sacrifice:
how my father walked six miles in dark tunnels
for two shillings and seven pence per square yard
to resurrect carbon asleep for a million years
to heat our carbon selves. My task to light the fires
burn the lustrous black, its marvel of smoky wings.
Jude Brigley
At Sea’s Edge
(Miners’ fortnight, Barry Island)
The valleys exhale; their people,
like clouds of dust blown headlong
by an offshore wind, become drifts
in the workings of excursion trains.
Collieries and chapels as day trippers;
a wheeze coastwards to Barry Island,
where you’ll not put a fag paper
between families on the beach.
Each shift below is a down –
payment to Charon; today, pennies
are for ice creams, candy floss,
donkey rides, trays for the beach.
At sea’s edge miners wonder,
staring at waves that taste of tears,
keep coming as rungs of ladders
you might climb to the widening sky.
They breathe deep as if re-learning
a lost skill; suck air so pure it sparks
like lightning bolts within lungs
that crackle as Velcro pulled apart.
The valleys inhale; going home, singing
poetry of deliverance and hope to scraps
of cloud that hang over abrupt valleys,
so steep the pull is only ever down.
Patrick Lodge
In Memory of Denis Royston, Age 20
(who lost his life at the Simon Wood Colliery in 1893)
He leaves the house in Cob-car Lane,
the sweat of passion on his chest,
his bride still curled in honeyed sheets,
so soft her hair, her lips so sweet.
A blackbird worms the new mown grass,
a crow caw-caws at treetop height,
and pigeons flap the rose-tint dawn,
flap, flap towards their boarder home.
He swings his lamp to match his stride,
a glint of sunlight in the brass,
his fingers tight round grease-proofed snap,
his bread and drip so neatly wrapped.
‘Ey up,’ he shouts, to cousin Fred
at number 10, still half asleep,
as clogs hit gravel down the road,
a Monday face, hooped head hung low.
Then men, not four but forty-four
clog, clog towards the Simon Wood,
horizon clouds streak rosy-red,
so brief the warning sky, unread
And down they go into the pit,
where no crow caws, no pigeons flap,
Down, down among dead dragon graves,
with lamp & pick & rod & spade.
In Cob-car Lane the sheets go out,
the threat of rain sees anxious eyes,
but Lucy isn’t one to shirk,
her place is in the home, her work
to please her husband, so she sets
about & cleans & bakes & sings
her praises to the Lord, and all
is neat and dry before the squall.
Black storm clouds burst, a hailing storm,
a wailing storm, a flooding storm.
Catastrophe, the bell is rung,
closed doors throw wide, shawled arms are flung,
Another victim of the mine:
another premature demise.
Brave Lucy cries, her heart is ripped,
so soft her hair, so sweet her lips.
Jane Sharp
Clear Out
The other thing we found
apart from the coronation flags
in the loft were lumps of coal
right at the back of the outhouse.
They shone deep blue next
to the snowdrops tearing through
the lawn. My grandfather, whose love letters
sat in a black plastic bag at the bottom
of the stairs, never went down the pit,
but his dad did—Colliery deputy under ground—
and after him they’re all miners
back to James Holmes whose body
was eventually found at the bottom
of a ventilation shaft. He was fifteen
and he was buried in the churchyard
in the village that is actually two villages
and you only know which is which
if you are from there. Shirland and Higham
blur into one. My grandad’s letters flare
at the bottom of the stairs. My ancestors’ bones
spark like flints in the dark.
Ian Harker
A Small Jar of Coffee and a Packet of Teacakes
They both worked down the pit, her husband and son.
That whole year we had nothing. Nothing.
She remembers the first pay after they went back,
how she stood between the stacked shelves in Carrick’s
and cried, not knowing what to do with the money.
Claire Lynn
The Cage
(On the 40th Anniversary of the Miners’ Strike)
Ten colliers entered the lamp room,
each exchanging a numbered token
for the corresponding lamp.
They walk towards the pit shaft where the cage
is held taut by metal cable.
There’s not much talk as each man
gives a second token to the banksman.
It’s cold and breezy, soon to be forgotten on the ten-hour shift.
The men are now aboard the cage
with ten shovels, snap tins, and flasks.
The cage door is pulled across and bolted.
Suddenly, the giant wheel of the pit head
spins as the cage
Plunges
Plunges
Plunges.
The square of light above
is quickly replaced by ten lamp lights in pitch darkness,
their beams dancing about like uncoordinated searchlights.
The men in the cage
are young, old, and middle-aged -
every one with a personal history,
with family waiting in the mining village ‘Up top’.
The rising heat and humidity become almost unbearable.
Suddenly-
the cage jolts
and the ten lamps align themselves
as the cage door is unbolted and opened
and the men enter the horizontal shaft.
These men will shine a light for each other
and watch each other’s back today.
Giving respect to King Coal
but on Saturday night at the Welfare,
and on Sunday at Church or Chapel,
they will give thanks for another week of survival.
Barrie Kemp
Subtitling the Movie Pride
Dole, picket line, scab. Feel the weight
as you mine their translations, hauled
from the coal face of the dictionary,
their ballast of history and Thatcher.
Wind your way deep into the glossary
of mining terms like the van into the Welsh hills.
Let the stillness of the jobless town
fill the screen, condensing dialogue
like those men and women who had to do without
living off welfare and food parcels,
burning the furniture to stay warm.
If you could, you would translate
the kiss on the staircase, the shadow of AIDS,
but there are no words, it sinks through the body
like a mineshaft in any language.
Step into Welsh, hiraeth, like the gays and lesbians
into the quiet of the working men’s club,
let liquid consonants fill the room like Jonathan dancing,
the solidarity and the bleakness
of the marching band at the end of the strike.
And in bold, capital letters write out
how the miners joined the 1985 London Pride,
their 100-year-old embroidered union banner
shone rainbow colours. Translate into every language
how the miners’ unions block voted
gay and lesbian rights into Labour’s manifesto.
Write this at the bottom of the screen
white as hope on a band black as coal dust.
L.B. Jørgensen
The 2014 movie Pride directed by Matthew Warchus is based on the LGSM (Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners) who collected money in support of the miners during the 1984-1985 strike and the relationship with the small Welsh mining town Onllwyn.
what I learned
(reflections on Orgreave)
as a teenager in school always in line waiting to be picked for one team or another it depended on who your friends were the cut of your hair or the badges on your coat but out in the world the choices are yours so pick a side would it be the work-wrung men in pithead baths washing the filth from each others backs or the women's collective feeding the village from a single kitchen or perhaps you could operate cameras on a rooftop rolling them backwards proving the lies or would you stand at the pre-dawn roadblocks stopping free men from driving where they chose pick a side in the end it is all about knowing which side of the riot shield you can live on the middle ground is nowhere and sitting on the fence hurts so find your people stand with them
from a position
of power brutality
is loosed upon us
Nick Allen
Danger’s Mouth
A jewel black chest
of sculpted earth bowels
pulses to the violent
seismic shock and shout
of man and machine.
Seven hundred metres down
a swarm of human bees
toil in danger’s mouth,
the soft veins of man against
the hard veins of black riches.
In the heat of a black sandstorm
an army of muscle and sweat
plunders bitter earth flowers,
pressed into green pages,
blackened over millennia.
This carbon fossil treasure
of honey-black tea-gold
is the nectar that powers
the insatiable demands
of capital, empire and industry.
Ninety years on, Silverwood
closes its catacomb hollow
of noxious and twisted roads,
the air stilled in a solemn salute
to snap tin conversation.
Glenn Barker
Two types of birds
The post-coal landscape screams and splits in shards: a shattered mirror.
It's bad luck, don't you know.
A shard is the glint of an eye.
Look at the land. It's razed and washed of the dust that charcoal- lined its creases. Its skin is pricked with barbs.
Hollow eyes, stilled lips. No chick-yellow canary sings on its shoulder,
Fel butty bach.
Its water-wobble portrait no longer rises each morning to return blue-black in the
spread of night. Skin that's no longer scrubbed back to white by each evening's fire.
Now, there's no longer a hungry work- weary face, a stumble- tired cheek to kiss in a welcome home.
The canary is long gone, but in this valley, the redstart still sings.
Catrin Mari
Note- ‘Fel butty bach’ - South Wales dialect: ‘like a little friend’, butty being a word for friend with origins in coal mining.
He goes back
He played his flute to support the strike,
the instrument of lonely shepherds,
of groves and goats.
In the Methodist halls of the Dearne,
he played barn dances and ate pork pies
to raise spirits and cash.
He didn’t grasp the hubbub of loss,
didn’t know he was playing at a wake,
wore a badge of solidarity
as he puffed through ‘Redwing’.
His band supported The Chuffinelles,
three women in overalls
who spat out comedy to kick back
and now grin from an archive.
His tarnished flute still ripples
over the roofs of darkened towns
but causes shift and these days he stops
climate change in rundown halls.
Occasionally, he drives through a village
where the pit has become green hills
that suggest shepherds.
One of the dancers shuffles round the block
to buy a four pack from the last shop.
The flutist didn’t lose his job, his house, his self –
the music was a small thing.
One torn night, he dreams a slog
through brick streets to mine gates
hung with a hand drawn banner –
‘Flutists against pit closures’.
When he wakes up, he is so angry.
Adam Strickson
My Egg
The strike co-ordinator
had counted the men out
and counted them back
like Brian Hanrahan
in the Falklands. No arrests
today, that's a bonus.
He checked his egg too,
and it was safe. Off to the kitchen
where the raucous women
were ready to deliver breakfast
to the pickets. Beans and tomatoes
were free, but you had to bring
your own egg. His egg
was cracked into the spitting fat
and the clear liquid quickly
turned to white. Not too well done, duck!
came the order for a second egg.
You had to watch your egg like a hawk
until it joined your beans on the plate.
One eye on the bubbling egg,
the other on the cracked shell
that lay discarded in the bin.
Tim Fellows
The anger
there is a fire
under our feet
it sparks along
ruined galleries
burns through roof-falls
collapsed hydraulics
patches of blackdamp
the men have gone
the mines have gone
but what was done there
what was said and what
was mounted on pale horses
what was struck down
what was cracked open
are known to us all
in the shifting landscape
of new estates built
on capped shafts
a single pit-wheel
stuck in concrete
outside the village
a broken backed terrace
a boarded up high street
and always the anger
David Harmer
The Wheel
The pithead used to dominate the town.
My dead forefathers came and went,
were buried in the shadow cast by it.
Passing on my way to school
I heard its revolutions in the night.
If the pithead was the place's heart
the great wheel was its soul.
And then there was the slow dismantling.
The slag heap was grassed over; it became
an innocent green mound where cattle graze.
They hauled the winding gear away
and sold the chain for scrap
then took the giant wheel and clamped it down.
They did this to remind us where we came from,
what we did and who we were -
a monument of rusting metal spokes
that radiate from hub to rim
for kids to climb on, point at questioning.
Someday we'll come with picks and dynamite,
dislodge it from its concrete plinth.
We''ll drag it from the valley floor,
aim it at the cities of the south,
set the wheel in motion, watch it roll.
Ian Parks
Contributors
Nick Allen is a poet and trade union activist living in West Yorkshire. His poems have appeared in many anthologies - most recently No Net Ensnares Me edited by Ian Humphreys and Apocalyptic Landscape edited by Steve Ely. His four pamphlets and one collection of poetry are available here: linktr.ee/nickallenpoet
Glenn Barker writes on the human condition, the intangible and ephemeral, natural and supernatural, and the fractured moral vacuum of contemporary life. Published in Broken Spine, Black Bough and other anthologies, he enjoys supporting the life of the writing community as a reviewer, and performing at local open mic events.
Jude Brigley was born in Maesteg. Her father was a miner but her family would not even have been in Maesteg if not for mining. Her great great grandfather, John Watts was a miner's agent and the majority of men in his family were miners. Her ancestors were involved in the collapse of the mine in Landshipping where the sea flooded the shafts. Some of her ancestors died in that disaster and sadly, another relation was the manager. Mining was very much part of her history.
Paul Brough is a Yorkshire based illustrator. You can see more of his artwork here
Neil Clarkson has had a long-standing association with the Albert Poets in Huddersfield. He has been published in magazines including Pennine Platform, Poetica Review, Honest Ulsterman, Riggwelter, The Blue Nib, The Black Horse, Pangolin Review and Obsessed by Pipework. He has won prizes in numerous competitions. His debut collection, Build You Again from Wood, was published in February 2017 by Calder Valley Poetry.
Pete Douglas has lived in coal mining areas all his life although he never went down a mine he grew up with miners and their sons. He has written Poetry for numerous years before really getting into it with Read To Write and Ian Parks. His claim to fame is that he lives in Goldthorpe where the effigy of Maggie was burned!
Tim Fellows is a writer and editor from Chesterfield, Derbyshire. His pamphlet, Heritage (2019) was inspired by his background in a mining community. His poems have been published in Black Bough, Black Nore Review, The Lake and The Morning Star, among others.
Jem Henderson is a genderqueer poet from Leeds. an othered mother and their collaborative project Genderfux came out in 2022 and Motherflux, its sequel in 2024. A collection with Chris Cambell, small plates, is out now. Their grandfather’s family all lived and worked in Armthorpe, Doncaster in the Markham Main mine. Find them @jemfacepoetry
Ian Harker is co-founder of Strix magazine and a director of Leeds Lit Fest. He has two previous books with Templar Poetry. An Honorary Fellow of Leeds Trinity University, A - Z of Superstitions was published in 2023 by Yaffle Press. He was shortlisted for the Tempest Prize judged by Andrew McMillan and Patience Agbabi.
David Harmer was born in 1952. He lives in Doncaster. Publishing as a children’s writer with MacMillans Children’s Books and Small Donkey Press, he also has work for the Grown Ups in many magazines. He performs with Ray Globe as The Glummer Twins, often at the Edinburgh Fringe. For many years he taught in primary schools serving NCB communities.
Charlotte Holm lives in East Yorkshire and is a textile artist, mother and carer. She has had poems published in Black Nore Review, Ink Sweat and Tears, The Fig Tree, and Sixty-Odd Poets, and was also included in the 2024 Ripon and High Wolds Poetry anthologies.
L.B. Jørgensen is a Danish poet writing in English. She does translation and subtitling and has had poems published in several magazines. Her debut pamphlet A Woman Travelling was published by Paekakariki Press in 2024.
Barrie Kemp lives near Bedford but his heart is in the Midlands. He was never ‘down the pit’ but his grandfather and father, both from South Wales, and his English grandfather, spent their working lives in them. As a child he remembers visiting the New Arley pit canteen on payday.
Patrick Lodge is an Irish/ Welsh poet who has won several poetry competitions and is widely published. He reviews for several magazines and has three full collections. His fourth is due out Summer 2025 with Valley Press and is called There You Are
Claire Lynn won the Metro Poetry Prize and the Mist and Mountain International Poetry Prize in 2023. She has poems in Menopause: The Anthology (Arachne Press, 2023), and 2024 Candlestick Press pamphlet Wish You Were Here. She was a New Northern Poet at the Ilkley Literature Festival in October 2024.
R.P. Moran is based in Edinburgh, Scotland, has written poetry from the mid-1980s and has a number of pieces published. Now working in the heritage sector much of their work finds inspiration in the historic and natural environment.
Ian Parks is the editor of Versions of the North: Contemporary Yorkshire Poetry. His versions of the modern Greek poet Constantine Cavafy were a Poetry Book Society Choice. His Selected Poems 1983-2023 is published by Calder Valley Poetry. His work appears in the Folio Book of Love Poems.
Catrin Mari is a Welsh-speaking poet and social researcher based in Cardiff. Her poetry deals with themes of under-represented historic figures including activists, sense of place; and shifting identities. Her work has been published widely in anthologies, journals and online, and she is working on a first pamphlet.
Jane Sharp is a Yorkshire poet who is published widely and has had her work broadcast on BBC Radio. She has headlined at several poetry events. Her publications include Tears From the Sun, Higgs Bottom, A Poet in Glenridding, A Poet in Barnsley and Cretan Whispers. Her website is: janesharp.org
Adam Strickson has been published by Valley Press, Graft and Wrecking Ball, has been Poet in Residence for Ilkley Literature Festival and lives in the Colne Valley. He settled in Yorkshire during the Miners’ Strike and played the flute in the halls of South Yorks in a band, raising funds for the struggle.
Sarah Wimbush is a Yorkshire writer and the recipient of a Northern Writers Award. Her collections are Bloodlines (2020), The Last Dinosaur in Doncaster (2021), Shelling Peas with my Grandmother in the Gorgiolands (2022) and STRIKE (2024). STRIKE was nominated for The 2024 Forward Prize Best Collection.
Acknowledgements
Nick Allen’s what I learned was published on https://petrahilgers.wordpress.com/ and was the product of a writing class at the National Coal Mining Museum.
mussels withcoal oil originally appeared in Jem Henderson’s collaborative collection small plates in 2023
Barrie Kemp’s The Cage was first published in Hold Your Fire - the 2024 Anthology of Poetry ID
Ian Parks’ The Wheel was first published in The Exile’s House (Waterloo, 2012)
Sarah Wimbush’s Boy Riddlers appeared in STRIKE (Stairwell Books, 2024)
All contributors retain copyright of their work.
I’ve just found this- read and wept. The Whysalls were Derbyshire miners.
Cracking issue. I couldn't even single out one poem as being 'above' the others 😀