PAUL BATCHELOR was born in Northumberland. At Newcastle University, he wrote a PhD on Barry MacSweeney’s poetry. He now works as a freelance teacher and reviews regularly for the Guardian and the TLS. His first book, The Sinking Road, was published by Bloodaxe in 2008. He has received an Eric Gregory Award, the Arthur Welton award, and the 2009 Times Stephen Spender Prize for Translation; he also won the 2009 Edwin Morgan International Poetry Competition. www.paulbatchelor.co.uk.
Coal has always been synonymous with the exploitation of both the working class and the environment. Given the fact that my father, both of my uncles and both grandfathers were miners of one sort or another, and that I grew up in the 1980s, when the mining industry was destroyed, it should have been possible for me to write a poem of straightforward solidarity or condemnation on the matter. ‘Brother Coal’ is not that poem. Instead, something more ambiguous emerged, and the poem is as much about coming to poetry as anything else. Perhaps it is simply impossible to express an undivided loyalty in poetry. Poetry wants all of the loyalty for itself. In his essay on Coriolanus, William Hazlitt stated this in stark, unforgettable terms: ‘The language of poetry naturally falls in with the language of power… Poetry is right royal.’
Similarly, ‘Pit Ponies’ did not turn out as I had intended. I wanted to write about the strike of 1984–85, but found myself focusing on a much smaller strike in the 1940s. Pit ponies would usually be stabled underground, and only brought up when the pit shut down for its annual holiday, or for a strike. ‘Pit Ponies’ likens the excitement the ponies displayed on such occasions to the hopes of the striking miners. The poem was written in response to an account I heard of the ponies being brought up; and also to Wilfrid Gibson’s poem ‘The Ponies’, which describes a similar event, and includes some nice touches, before ending somewhat desperately with the lines: ‘Mayhap one day / Our masters, too, will go on strike, and we / Escape the dark and drudgery of the pit, / And race unreined around the fields of heaven!’
Like many of my recent poems, ‘Brother Coal’ and ‘Pit Ponies’ took a long time to write: three and five years respectively. My fascination with Rilke’s French poems arose at a time when I worried that this slow-burn work might permanently cut me off from the impulse to write lyric poems. Rilke’s French poems are brief, beautiful, intense, odd, fragile things, and I hoped that translating them might keep that line of communication open.