Poetry Anthology Launch
Join us for a launch event of The COAL Anthology, celebrating the publication of an important and powerful anthology of poems, prose and photographs. Anthology editors Sarah Wimbush, Ann Sansom and Peter Sansom will be joined by contributors to the anthology to read a selection of the work.
To mark the 40th anniversary of the Miners’ Strike, The Poetry Business has worked with the poet Sarah Wimbush, author of STRIKE (Stairwell Books, 2024), and the National Coal Mining Museum for England to produce an anthology of poetry and other creative responses that encompass the years leading up to the strike, the strike itself, and its aftermath. Throughout 2024, The Poetry Business and NCMME worked with a number of poets from the North of England and from Wales to run a series of workshops that encouraged participants nationwide to develop their own creative responses to the anniversary of the strike, and some of these are included in the anthology. The COAL anthology is accompanied by an expanded online anthology, which includes further poems and reflections on this period of British history and its continuing impact.
COAL features work from established poets, including Simon Armitage, Liz Berry, Gillian Clarke, Ian McMillan and Helen Mort, alongside newer voices also writing about mining and the communities that mean or meant so much to them. Accompanying these poems are insightful and often moving prose accounts together with work by photographers such as John Harris, Keith Pattison and Brenda Prince, who captured some of the most powerful and evocative images of mining before, during and after the strike.
Vivid prose, powerful verse and photographs of remarkable immediacy make this a compelling and still utterly relevant collection. Like the black stuff itself, these pieces compress time and thought into dark, hard, brilliant nuggets that flare and burn, scorch and illuminate; exploring how coal and the job of working with it has shaped lives, landscapes and culture. And how – for all the vagaries of politics and its enemies – it continues to be a secret, muscular seam that runs through the lives of many of us. – Stuart Maconie
