Arthur Scargill — Steve Ely

As posts go you’ll have to squint to see that last one, way back in the mud of May ’13, which is getting on for a year now. Which is probably why it’s a strain to remember much of what went on and why and where, why there has been such a long hiatus. Work, yes. And London. But that time seems, above all else, a good whole to leave behind; a skin to shed, back before I had my VISA and my flights, when moving on was less final. 

Somewhere in there though I happened to say a brief hello to Steve Ely again, after an initial meeting back when I posted about his fellow Yorkshire Arts Circus’s Writer Development Programme graduate Becky Cherriman. 

That second meeting was at the Forward Prize ceremony in London, in October, where I had the pleasure of meeting the lovely Mona Arshi and where Oswald’s Book of Hours was up for the Felix Dennis Best First Collection and ‘Compline: Coronation of the Virgin’ got read by an actor (a feature of the evening Katy Evans-Bush covers expertly). 

It must be gratifying for Steve that Oswald was recently nominated for a prize in the name of the poet he very much admires, Ted Hughes. A fact that’s fairly indisputable, “bet I'm the only nominee who's actually written a book about Hughes,” Steve gleefully wagers on his website. I wish him best of luck at the award ceremony taking place in London this Friday.

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‘Arthur Scargill’ is the first sonnet of a sequence entitled ‘Memorials of the Saints,’ which concludes Oswald’s Book of Hours, published by Smokestack Books in 2013.  

Arthur Scargill

The lowest of the low and low-paid,

the primary men; farmhands, quarrymen, colliers.

Crude men, of appetite and violence, mumblers,

white-knucklers, averters of eyes. Beasts of burden,

their lives lived out in the rhythm

of the Coal Board’s seasons: days and afters,

Henry Halls, neets reg. Larks orbiting the wheel

and the cold cage falling. Crushed torsoes under splintered 

chocks, amputations on the maingate rip,

blood-streaked phlegm hocked-up. Surface to the land

of cockaigne: egg and chips, beer and the bookies.

You brought them health and Palma de Mallorca,

Cortinas on the drive and kids in college,

reading Marx and Mao and The Wealth of Nations.

‘Here, here,’ rings out the gruff and immediate response to this sonnet in the recording, the politics and the sentiment meeting with approval. But don’t let that make you think this is a poem that shirks the responsibilities of poemhood. Chances are the audience knew they agreed with the politics of the voice before they heard the poem, but this is a poem of a rare muscular affirmation. 

I’ve heard complaints from older poets about my generation for their a-political existence. But even among the elders, politics in poems—at least overtly—isn’t practised widely. Yet this poem isn’t ashamed of its opinion; it sticks its heels in and grinds out its music. Not that it’s just a grim old thing, though parts of it are. It is harsh historical realism married to something sweeter, the Henry Halls, the lark, gloriously, “orbiting the wheel.” It reminds me, if anything, of a folksong in the line of Harry ‘Haywire Mac,’ one that manages to be sternly knowing and affectionate. 

Though the guts of it are grim, the blood in the phlegm, the crush, and the rip, you get the notion that this is because it's got guts. It's got “muscles and enjambments and eight and six,” “a waist and a middle—it is a form.” So as Heaney has it, as opposed to those sonnets “going the rounds in the United States,” this one packs an audible punch and holds true to poetry as “a muscular response,” (Schmidt, Lives of the Poets, 843, 1998) something Hughes would surely have approved of. 

And what impressed me the most initially, that echo, that response from the audience. The guttural grunt of affirmation, the agreement that this is a position to hold on to. I hope Steve soon receives further national and international recognition for hitting the nail on the head for the community he writes in.