Northumbrian scenery, rural and urban, is constantly unfolded in Barry MacSweeney's art. His style, subjected to intense elaboration and development, may reflect local speech patterns and life values; but is broader and deeper in its account of experience than ordinary talk in the pub. Every failed strike raises the possibility of an other history, how victory could have been enjoyed in a society with a broader flatter distribution of power, a more collective ethos. The concern with writing alternative histories has largely been confined to interviews and false claims in advertising copy; MacSweeney has actually written a history of coal-mining in the North-east, in Black Torch, which floats the postulate of a different history and invests a startling documentary energy to keep that imaginary picture alive for a whole volume, until it is too large and strong to be set aside. This wonderful book was announced, in Poetry Information 18, as follows:
"Black Torch, book 1, a first part of a long projected work, drawing on the political/social activity of Northumberland and Durham miners, will be published by London Pride Editions this autumn. Much of it is in Northumbrian dialect. Book 2, half finished, works around John Martin's diaries-he is the Northumbrian painter-tracts by radical Baptist ministers, and the trial of T. Dan Smith. Book 3 is planned to be based on tape recordings with residents of Sparty Lea and the Allen Valley in Northumberland." Book 1 did come out in 1978, with a list of works at the front which announces books 2 and 3; but these were never written. 'Blackbird', an elegy for his grandfather, published in the Paladin new british poetry, is book 4 of the work. The black torch is coal itself. The evocation of social conflict-something incredibly rare in British poetry-brings us back, of course, to the importance of strength, in all forms of self-possession, courage, endurance, in such contests. It's not enough to have novel ideas, you also have to win at the showdown, or it's all academic, and it doesn't even have psychological interest; it could only be important if it was going to affect real life. There is a large range of documentary about Tyneside in his other work, for example Ranter and Pearl; he has recounted in an interview how the geography of his home town, with near-wild countryside right beside working-class slums, helped shape his work. Obviously, such juxtapositions, around large industrial towns subject to stoppages of trade and to periodic conflicts between owners and workers, are common in Scotland, South Wales, and the North of England; unique qualities are unlikely to be the decisive ones. What is special about Black Torch is its imaginative daring in going back many centuries to explain how social attitudes came about, making the present explicable rather than mysterious. The dialect mentioned is the reported speech of 19th century striking miners, and belongs to the documentary part of the poem, not to the contemporary world and to the poet's own voice. (We should also mention Tom Pickard's dialect poems, very short and deprived of expressive possibilities.)