Coal and Fire: Poems of Labour, Memory and Inheritance
£10.00
From the Rhondda to the Black Country this exceptionally evocative poetry of two places reminds us of the working conditions our ancestors endured, of the industrial disasters that blighted lives, and the importance of kinship and community. Highly relevant and highly readable.
ISBN: 978-1-918132-04-5, 40pps., £10 inc. p. and p.
In this centenary year of the General Strike, Coal and Fire commemorates that national industrial impasse of 4-12 May 1926 in which Richard Devereux’s grandfathers—one a Rhondda miner, the other a Black Country ‘bobby’—were pitched on opposite sides.
Devereux meditates much on his Welsh heritage through his ‘Dadcu’, and the physical, spiritual and psychological legacy of coal mining, in poems as tautly crafted and chiselled ‘as the cracks they crawled through’.
Other subjects covered are the Chainmakers’ Strike of 1910, the 1966 Aberfan Disaster, and a cricket match between an Oxford College and a team of Derbyshire Miners with ‘blanco-ed boots’. Coal and Fire is a testament to how poetic imagination and craftsmanship can sculpt the dustiest experiences into polished marble on the page.
ISBN: 978-1-918132-04-5, 40pps., £10 inc. p. and p.
