Marratide
Selected Poems
William Martin author Peter Armstrong editor Jake Morris-Campbell editor
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Publishing:22nd May '25
£14.99
This title is due to be published on 22nd May, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
William Martin (1925-2010) was a poet of extraordinary vision and musicality. Thoroughly grounded in his native North-East England, its pit communities and industry, his song-like poems nevertheless traverse a vast geographical and historical landscape ranging from deep Celtic and Anglo-Saxon sources to the mythology and sacred sites of India, via a passionate political engagement that never limits song to mere rhetoric. He also drew on children’s games, ballads and street songs in poems showing both political anger and a wider concern for a society losing its common ground, its rituals and rites of passage.
William Martin is a remembrancer, patiently polishing the common coins of street games, folk songs and customs, and putting them back into circulation… David Jones comes to mind, but not as an immediate ancestor. Martin seems closer to George Mackay Brown, firmly rooted in a specific community and able to give the elements of its common life a sacramental value. But perhaps he is closest of all to the Vasko Popa of Earth Erect, eschewing private poetry to restore the collective symbols, releaf the ikons with gold. -- Roger Garfitt * London Magazine *
A linguistic adventure to be undertaken, surreal in character, but serene in tone, composed of fragments firmly controlled to make a mosaic of meaning from the range of sources. -- Fenella Copplestone * PN Review, on Marra Familia *
Excitement consequent upon a distinctive voice and vision… Martin’s forms appear to be as simply complex as a recovered childhood… he has not abandoned utter song. -- Chris McCully * PN Review, on Cracknrigg *
ISBN: 9781780377469
Dimensions: 234mm x 156mm x 13mm
Weight: unknown
160 pages
Paperback original