William Martin (1925-2010) was a poet of extraordinary vision and musicality. Thoroughly grounded in his native North-East England, its pit communities and industry, his song-like poems nevertheless traverse a vast geographical and historical landscape ranging from deep Celtic and Anglo-Saxon sources to the thought and myths of India, via a passionate political engagement that never limits song to mere rhetoric. He also drew on children’s games, ballads and street songs in poems showing both political anger and a wider concern for a society losing its common ground, its rituals and rites of passage.
'A linguistic adventure to be undertaken, surreal in character, but serene in tone, composed of fragments firmly controlled to make a mosaic of meaning from the range of sources.’ – Fenella Copplestone, PN Review, on Marra Familia
'Excitement consequent upon a distinctive voice and vision… Martin’s forms appear to be as simply complex as a recovered childhood… he has not abandoned utter song.’ – Chris McCully, PN Review, on Cracknrigg
‘William Martin is a remembrancer, patiently polishing the common coins of street games, folk songs and customs, and putting them back into circulation… David Jones comes to mind, but not as an immediate ancestor. Martin seems closer to George Mackay Brown, firmly rooted in a specific community and able to give the elements of its common life a sacramental value. But perhaps he is closest of all to the Vasko Popa of Earth Erect, eschewing private poetry to restore the collective symbols, releaf the ikons with gold.’ – Roger Garfitt, London Magazine
Durham Beatitude by William Martin
First screened at the 2022 Durham Miners Gala, this film combines footage of past Gala gatherings with William Martin reading his poem ‘Durham Beatitude’ which mourns the 83 lives lost in the Easington Colliery Disaster of 1951, remembered at the Gala in 1980. It was first published in William Martin’s collection Cracknrigg (Taxvus Press, 1983) and later included in his final collection from Bloodaxe, Lammas Alanna (2000).
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