An
eternal dilemma when tackling a review is whether to adopt an extrinsic or
intrinsic approach, whether to consider the book purely in the context of the
text itself, or whether to bear in mind any backstory or biographical context
that the writer has preferred not to invoke explicitly. However, in the case of
Graeme Richardson’s new pamphlet, Last of
the Coalmine Choirboys (New Walk Editions, 2024), this dilemma becomes
especially significant.
How
to approach these poems without taking into account the fact that Richardson is
the Sunday Times poetry critic? How to approach these poems without registering
his day job in the archaeology department at the Max Planck Institute of
Geoanthropology? How to approach these poems without contemplating his current perspective
as a resident of Germany?
This last point is striking. Last of the Coalmine
Choirboys’ sole setting is the U.K., and a very specific location at that,
loaded with connotations of religión and industry. Brexit seems never to have
happened. The poet himself has never been displaced. Except, of course, that it
has. And he has. Which means that these poems can very much be seen as
historical documents, if we understand history as a set of partial stories.
In such a context, Richardson’s use of tenses becomes extremely interesting. One such example is ‘Those Amiable Dwellings’, which switches back and forth
between the present and past, generating unease as to the reliability of its
narrative perspective, then casting doubts on its own view of memory, shifting
from ‘I tried to remember’
to ‘I remembered
acutely’ within the space of
a few lines, undercutting any sense of nostalgia, as in the following lines...
‘…Coke-furnace sunset in Clipstone Forest.
The headstocks grazing peacefully in the distance.
Before the sponsored walk, Dad would drive us round,
marking out the route with sawdust arrows,
Sports Report on the radio.
I cried for my mum, but was told
that wouldn’t do…’
The above extract is
representative of an implicit questioning that runs through the pamphlet,
revolving around key aspects of religión, family and industry, all viewed through the lens of the individual, as in the opening stanza of ‘Unlatched and Lit’…
‘This
sanctuary of my soul
at
midnight is a seam of coal,
packed
with power but hard to break.
I mine it as I lie awake…’
These deliciously judged lines also display Richardson’s
awareness of form, rhyme and aural patterning. His poems are packed with
scrupulous turns of phrase in which no word is used without regard for its
connotations and ramifications. There’s a thorough, methodical, academically
trained mind at work here, though the poems are immediately accesible, which
means that many of the interesting notes at the end of the manuscript aren’t
actually needed when tackling the work itself.
Perhaps the most surprising inclusions are two prose poems
that feel like drum solos in the middle of a finely constructed song. Both in
terms of syntax and semantics, they jolt the reader into wondering whether they
fit in and pull their weight in the pamphlet as a whole.
Throughout Last of the
Coalmine Choirboys, there’s unspoken exile, the perspective of someone who
now returns on visits rather than inhabiting these scenes. In both temporal and
spatial terms, implied otherness runs powerfully below the surface of this
collection. Would it benefit from their explicit invocation? Or are some things
best left unsaid and to the reader’s imaginiation? Or will they represent the
next step on Graeme Richardson’s poetic journey…?
