Marratide

Name: Marratide
Brand: Bloodaxe
Price: 40.75 AUD

Selected Poems

By: William Martin, Peter Armstrong (Editor), Jake Morris-Campbell (Editor)

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Paperback | 22 January 2025

At a Glance

Paperback
256 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
23.4 x 15.8 x 1.5

Paperback

RRP $42.99

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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 mythology and sacred sites 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.

Marratide: Selected Poems brings together poems from William Martin's four collections Cracknrigg (1983) and Hinny Beata (1987) from Taxus Press; and Marra Familia (1993) and Lammas Alanna (2000), from Bloodaxe Books. Two comprehensive introductory essays by editors Peter Armstrong and Jake Morris-Campbell discuss the life and poetry of William Martin in this edition published to celebrate his centenary.

A QR code printed in the book links to archive audio recordings of poems read (and sung) by William Martin.

Industry Reviews

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 *
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 *

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