Output details
29 - English Language and Literature
University of Durham
New Poems
The poems gathered in ‘New Poems’ are submitted as a single item. They are united in their exploration of the poet’s early life and family background in North East England, and develop wider socio-cultural themes through the personal and the particular.
‘Butterwell’, which first appeared in Batchelor’s 2008 volume The Sinking Road, introduced a new, personal focus for his poetry. Like each of these more recent poems, it concerns aspects of his working-class upbringing in the 80s. ‘Brother Coal’ traces the impulse to write poetry back to his imaginative childhood terrain, addressing coal as though it were an imaginary friend, and asking whether poetry is born of solidarity or alienation. Like many of these poems, ‘Brother Coal’ approaches social and political themes from the perspective of family relationships. ‘The Messages’ is set during the miners’ strike of 1984-85, but is written from the point of view of a child who is more concerned about missing a football match: the poem contrasts the child’s priorities with the father’s less explicable lack of interest (“Don’t tell us what’s the score”) as a means of exploring cultural disenfranchisement. The two elegies for grandmothers, ‘Comeuppance’ and ‘The Love Darg’, are also concerned with how emotional inarticulacy may be handed on to younger generations.
Batchelor uses a wide range of poetic forms. ‘Brother Coal’ is written in off-rhymed couplets and a relaxed iambic pentameter. In ‘Pit Ponies’, an account of an unsuccessful miners’ strike is cast in the self-consciously “literary” form of a sestina, the fixed pattern of repetitions reflecting the rigid social and political configurations of the stand-off. ‘To a Halver’ takes the form of an ode to a half-brick that has been thrown in a riot, and the poem speculates about the object’s history in order to explore the theme of civic unrest.