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The second in our Forward Prizes for Poetry interview series.

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Fady: Your book can’t be unseen, literally: the poems are enhanced by the photographs, and the photographs bring the text to life. How did you come up with the idea of accompanying the poems with photographs and what do you think its impact is?

Sarah: ‘Can’t be unseen’, that is a lovely phrase. Well, in 2021, my collection Shelling Peas with My Grandmother in the Gorgiolands was in the process of being pulled together. It was such an exciting moment. After years of absorbing the craft of poetry, my first full collection was due to be released in 2022 with the fantastic publisher Bloodaxe Books. We decided to include a group of poems about British coal-mining culture and the miners’ strike of 1984-85 towards the end of the collection; in fact, the final poem in Shelling Peas… became the lead poem in STRIKE.

It was this process of gathering coal poems which made me more mindful of the 40th strike anniversary forthcoming in 2024. I decided that I MUST write some kind of pamphlet to commemorate such a landmark event. Whatever I created had to be respectful of the trauma that those communities suffered during the strike year, so I applied for a Society of Authors’ Foundation Grant to buy me time to be able to write it well. I was lucky to be awarded a grant and began writing in 2022. By the time I had written a chunk of poems most publishers didn’t have any slots left but the punchy indie, Stairwell Books, saw the potential and we quickly pulled it all together.

‘STOP’ (initially published in Shelling Peas…) was one of the earliest poems I had written in response to strike photography. The picture was taken by the incredible photographer, John Harris, in a pit village called Rossington where I was working during the strike. The image captures the moment when the first strike-breaker (known as a scab) was smuggled into the pit by the police in July. The men were furious that the strike had been broken and all hell broke loose. They built a barricade out of anything they could find, blocking the pit gates. This barricade included a road traffic STOP sign which captures the desperation in that image and also their resolve. It was a lightbulb moment for me; after that I knew I could create key strike moments in poetry by responding to photographs from the time.

I feel our collections have similar kinds of themes such as conflict and despair. Like I have said, the miners’ strike was an event that I had to address. Would you say that […] was a book that demanded to be written and how did that come about for you?

Fady: The G word. The genocide of Palestinians demanded it. I wrote and composed the book over six weeks. Genocide does not happen overnight, and in any case, the Palestinian people have been dealing with variable, accelerating modes of their erasure and absenting in English for nearly a century now. I had to write this book.

In your collection, to bring back to living memory the strikes, the days of Thatcher and the 1980s, is to bring back a vexation the UK is committed to both forgetting and never forgetting. Which came first, the poems or the photographs?

Sarah: Yes, it often feels like a disposable story. Every five or ten years the strike is revisited by the media and then forgotten about again until the next airing, meanwhile those communities perpetually live with the consequences of the strike. Some documentaries still label the NUM as creators of the conflict, when of course it was Thatcher who took the pit closures to the miners with no plan to replace the jobs that would be lost. With the release of archive material there has also been an acknowledgement by some of the media that the striking miners were not all ‘communists’ or ‘the enemy’, as so brutally portrayed at the time. We also see the natural evolution of myth and the emergence of the ‘heroic-miner’ which is why I wanted to write about the strike as if it is happening right now – as the book says, ‘It’s March 1984’. That was a really important aspect for me, to write in that moment.

I am a very visual person. I was brought up with photography – Dad was a keen photographer and filmmaker – I definitely have his love of a good image. Photographs were the perfect medium to draw on when creating the narrative thread through the collection… and so, yes, the pamphlet idea somehow morphed into a full-blown collection. The photographs enabled me to tell the day-to-day story of how the strike played out on a domestic and political front as well as on the picket line. The powerful images, which I realised fairly early on had to be included, were taken by photographers who were able to get to the heart of those communities, people such as Keith Pattison, John Harris, Ken Wilkinson, John Sturrock, Peter Arkell, to name but a few.

It is interesting we both include a dedication in our collections. Yours is incredibly powerful and very much a prose poem. Was that intentional, did you want to create a final explosive contrast to the viscerally charged and succinct poetry which comes before it?

Fady: I wanted to be clear, that is all. In English, there are normalized tendencies with which we dominate the voices of our vanquished in the name of inclusivity and self-reflection. This is how power adapts while claiming it has evolved.

A dedication clears the air. A dedication sustains the event it will eventually move beyond/past. This is tragic to me. It is also what some art aspires to be. I wish I did not have to write this book, but poetry, as you know, can be a conversation between absence and presence, and their dual metaphors. Distance is not absence, but a metaphor of it. Departure is not presence, but the anticipated arrival of a presence.

At times your poems found the photographs. Other times the photographs found the poems. Is that fair to say? Did you feel one was always leading the other?

Sarah: I had a definite idea of the themes I wanted to write about in a chronological and narrative arc, even though selecting the photographs themselves became more of an organic process. Sometimes I’d look at an image and a poem would instantly arrive, almost like it had been waiting to be written. I suppose the subject had been consciously and subconsciously rattling around my head for almost 40 years. ‘Queen Coal’ is a good example of that; having known women from coal-mining communities I was able to capture those authentic monarchs fairly sharpish.

Other photographs took more consideration. ‘Scargill’ was a challenge. How do you capture the essence of such a character? ‘… that finger’ is a trademark feature that most people remember very clearly and Keith Pattison’s photograph beautifully captures him in that recognisable pose doing what he was best at – giving a speech. I think it is probably one of the stronger poems, maybe because I considered it more. ‘Death by Strike’ was a tricky subject to explore, and I had to pick an appropriate image to explore it with – writing about those who died was not easy, but writing about children being buried under collapsing coal spoil tips was a hugely emotional thing to do.

Your collection has an astonishing voice, at times chaotic but at other times ringing with clarity – it feels like there is a strong element of Ginsberg. Did the poems evolve in a free, unrestricted way or was there a more measured creative process? And like my experience with STRIKE, was […] an emotional journey in itself or were you able to separate yourself from the realities of the subject?

Fady: The book came quickly to me because it is a lived experience of a lifetime constantly in the making. Imagine the Palestinian existence in English as a personification of Cassandra. We do not suffer from epilepsy, fever, hallucination, visions, magical powers, nor are we monolingual clairvoyants who need specialised translators to make sense of what we say and who we are. Palestinians have connected the dots for decades. They’ve been there for all to see and feel. The Western world, where power against the Palestinian is centred, has refused to see the dots or the lines. Who are the Palestinians anyway to be able to force this clarity upon us?

Each reader will have a visceral relationship to at least one photograph in the book. Mine is the one of the topless burly man stood before the cavalry, cigarette in his hand, the way only a smoker holds a cigarette; his step between caution and defiance. What is your favourite photograph in the book, the one closest to your heart, and why? And what is your favourite poem in the book?

Sarah: I love that image too. Taken at The Battle of Orgreave, it really has a life of its own. A lone man half-naked seemingly nonchalantly skirting through a group of squeaky-clean togged-up mounted policemen – probably not quite as cool in the actual moment but that is the power of a photograph, it can conjure a reality of its own, something we have to be careful of misinterpreting.

Like all my children, I love all the images and poems equally, but some do stand out for me. ‘Coal Kid’ is a harrowing photo and hopefully the poem reflects the poignancy of that image and his jumper that reads ‘Giss a job’ and on the back ‘For my Dad’. ‘Women Against Pit Closures’ is such a strong image of a powerful independent woman, but then there is that slightly disturbing shadow of a man in the background harbouring all those traditional values which women of that generation were struggling to navigate at the time. ‘Mounted policeman canters towards Lesley Boulton’ – one of the most infamous images of the strike and truly disturbing. ‘The Three Feathers’ – such an intimidating letter to a working miners’ union, very powerful. My favourite poem is probably ‘Queen Coal’ based on women that I knew.

The photo closest to my heart would have to be ‘The Flat Cap’. It is the nearness of the man’s face and the fact it was taken a few days before the strike finished which is so moving. He knows it is all over; he knows his world, as brutal and difficult as it could be, is about to change forever and he will be disposed of. I hope the end of this poem reminds us to think of all those who worked in such difficult conditions for centuries through his flat cap, ‘what kind of man would have worn such a thing?’

My favourite poem in your collection is on page 19, ‘And out of nowhere a girl receives an ovation’. What a superb line! We can all see that moment – have seen that moment played out many times on television. I love how this subtle but heart wrenching poem speaks of war and the consequences of war whilst managing to be beautiful at the same time. Do you have a favourite poem in your book?

Fady: “I Seem as If I Am: Ten Maqams” is my favourite poem. It is my secret conversation with art from a thousand years ago, bringing it into the future. In this, it is similar to the scattering of love poems throughout the book. The work eros does in […] is a dance with dialogue. Palestinians make English nervous when we are simultaneities within ourselves, irreducible. To market Palestinian reducibility in English, English insists on a lot of violence. And a lot of heroism.

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Fady Joudah has published five previous collections of poems: The Earth in the Attic; Alight; Textu, a book-long sequence of short poems whose meter is based on cellphone character count; Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance; and, most recently, Tethered to Stars. He has translated several collections of poetry from Arabic and is co-editor/co-founder of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. He was winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 2007 and has received a PEN award, a Banipal/TLS prize from the UK, The Griffin Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Arab American Book Award.

Sarah Wimbush is a Doncaster poet who has lived in Leeds for 22 years. Her first collection, Shelling Peas with My Grandmother in the Gorgiolands, was published by Bloodaxe in 2022. She is the author of two prize-winning pamphlets: The Last Dinosaur in Doncaster (Smith/Doorstop, 2021) and Bloodlines (Seren, 2020). She has also placed in several single poem competitions including 1st in the Mslexia, 2nd in the Ledbury and 3rd in the Plough. Her work recently appeared in PN Review, the Morning Star and Poetry Wales. Sarah is currently working with The Poetry Business and the National Coal Mining Museum for England on a Coal Anthology, release autumn 2024.

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