Five - Some poems, a song and a prose piece
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 April 2022
Summary
Ray Hearne: I have chosen pieces not published elsewhere but which remain representative of my work since the millennium, i.e. a continuing sequence of writings wrestling with my attempts, as the child of immigrants, to define my sense of South Yorkshire-ness. From rural Catholic Ireland to Parkgate, a steel community, surrounded by chimneys, engirdled by collieries. A people defined by their labour in heavy industries, living in landscapes scorched, ravaged and degraded, speaking their own variants of a language scoffed at by the arbiters of good English. I kind of loved it. Written in the last few years the poems try to articulate the smoke-choked experience of the 1960s and 1970s.
Ryan Bramley: As a small boy, I grew up at the fringe of the world: Thurnscoe. I sat in the borough of Barnsley, with a Sheffield postcode and a Rotherham phone code; and yet, my little red terraced-house seemed closer to Doncaster than anything else. It set the tone for life to be lived on the periphery, and that's where my poem in this chapter finds itself: in a contested space between working-class pride, and middle-class aspiration; between belonging and rootlessness. The piece I have written centres on a large village called Wath-Upon-Dearne (or, as my lot at home used to say, ‘Waff-on-Dearne’), and how its former grammar-school-turned-comprehensive has long been heralded as one of South Yorkshire's brighter beacons of education – not because it teaches people how to value Rotherham, or Barnsley, or Doncaster, as home; but because it equips budding young students with the tools required to leave this place for good. And in my eyes, that's a great shame.
The film of the book of the film
A library of rare unwritten books,
Park Gaters; always at it, day and night,
priceless plot and character, whole epics
to be made of angel, giant, troglodyte.
“The dirtiest place in Europe” we could boast;
that hyperbolic trope from some telly feature
gave us a kind of identity, though the cost
we knew was stuntedness, it gave us stature.
Perverse it may have been but we were proud,
equal to the loud steel, the crafty coal,
those chains of chimneys, voluble and crude,
the slag itself choking our childish souls,
the three-shift treadmill's timeless clock-machine;
men whose darkened laughter never saw print,
women eclipsed by walls of washing-line,
even in the poem's light, still at their stint.
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- Information
- Re-imagining Contested CommunitiesConnecting Rotherham through Research, pp. 33 - 40Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2018