Mother Pit: Poems from Under the Ground
£10.00
The poems in Roger Cornish’s Mother Pit are hewn from twenty-three years working at the coalface, from 1974 until the last of Leicestershire’s three pits closed in 1997. These are empirical poems about fellow labourers and craftsmen, managers and deputies, accidents, and the heavy, dirty machinery of coal mining.
Mother Pit: Poems from Under the Ground, by Roger Cornish, ISBN 9781918132069, £10.
These are poems of preservation, not only of a way of life, but, just as vitally, of an entire occupational vocabulary. Evocative and descriptive terms are preserved here that might otherwise have been forever lost from common consciousness: back ripper, brashing off, chocks, gypsum, limmers, marlinespike, ostler, smoile, trapper, and many more.
Cornish’s autodidactic poetic practice places him firmly in the shadow lineage of self-taught English labouring-class poets, particularly pitmen poets such as Joseph Skipsey, Robert Elliott and Owen Watson. Cornish records his colleagues’ voices in occupational sociolect—as he explains in his Preface: ‘I have kept the words as they were spoken, dialect and all, because the words are half the work. To tidy them into proper English would be to lose the very thing worth saving’.
His well-chiselled lines have a muscular authenticity; they mine the rich seam of camaraderie deep underground, of conversations, yarns and laughter spun in industrial darkness. Mother Pit is an artefact of contemporary proletarian art of the first importance.
Mother Pit: Poems from Under the Ground, by Roger Cornish, ISBN 9781918132069, £10.
