Review - "Shelling Peas with My Grandmother in the Gorgiolands" by Sarah Wimbush
Sarah is a Leeds based poet who grew up in Doncaster. She grew up in a mining community and also has Romany heritage. In her first full collection, she dips into both of these traditions and pulls out some gorgeous memories, scattered with Yorkshire dialogue and (thankfully translated) Romany words.
The list of her publications and prizes is far too long to reproduce, and they are well deserved.
The collection is split into two parts, the first being a series of poems that touch on all aspects of Romany life, or at least a life that perhaps has disappeared now. Food and nature feature prominently, as indicated in the title of the collection, as does trading and interacting with the gorgios (non-Romany). But this is primarily about people, about culture. It's a world that seems familiar yet alien. A parallel culture. There are so many great examples I could quote but here are a couple of snippets that I think represent these poems.
In "The Calling Basket" Sarah describes the basket carried door to door by Romany women containing items to sell to the gorgios.
Black velvet trim for mourning mantles are long-tails.
Mother-of-pearl buttons are a pair of lost souls.
The ending is perfect:
And gorgios
who hide behind lock and book and jacquard curtain -
the young monisher who buys a bud of lace,
her rush to cross my palm with brass.
Monisher is the Romany word for woman. You can find a video of me reading this poem here.
In the title poem the Grandmother dispenses a range of advice both dubious and sensible:
Never tell anyone
when the visions come, that you collect dead
women's earrings.
Never smoke a pipe until you're at least ten.
There are tales of travelling, of the fear of being held in one place, distrust of outsiders, the making of a meat pudding, the cooking of a hedgehog. These things are in Sarah's blood and she tells them with both passion and clarity.
In the second part the collection shifts to the world of South Yorkshire in the 1970s and 1980s. This culture may be as alien to some of you as the Romany world is, but not to me. I grew up in the neighbouring coal fields of Derbyshire, and Sarah absolutely nails the period, the place, and the people.
There are very serious poems here but also humour - Inside Lingerie is a very funny description of men hanging around in a department store waiting for their wives to buy underwear.
Just as the first half finishes with "Bloodlines", a poem that encapsulates that part of the collection, part two finishes with the brilliant prose-poem Our Language.
This is the language of the pony riders and
jumped-up checkweighmen, of Davy lamps and Dudleys,
the oncostlads and gaffers, of black-nails and snap-tins, and
names like Arthur passed down through time till it's more
than a name, it has new meaning like the word GIANT
or STONE.
The poem I would pick out from this half is The Pencil Sharpener, a wonderful description of sharpening pencils at school using the little hand wound sharpening machine clamped to the teacher's desk and then Dad sharpening one at home with a knife. The ending of this poem is exquisite. You can listen to Sarah reading it here.
The cultural references are perfect - the £1 Premium Bond birthday gift, the pubs, the race course seen on TV, the miners on the old pit tip.
I could bang on about how technically brilliant these poems are - full of rhythm, images and varying in form from short, sharp poems (one of her pamphlets opens with a haiku), a concrete poem in the shape of a gold earring, to longer prose pieces that draw you in - but I prefer just to read them. And you should too.
Tim Fellows 28.2.23
"Shelling Peas with My Grandmother in the Gorgiolands" by Sarah Wimbush is published by Bloodaxe Books. Buy it here
