Unspoken exile, Graeme Richardson's Last of the Coalmine Choirboys

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 Which means that these poems can very much be seen as historical documents, if we understand history as a set of partial stories.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…?