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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.
'Somehow his poems feel ancient and modern at the same time, inhabiting both the past and the present at once. For me his masterpiece is his long sequence Marra Familia with its spare and beautiful descriptions of the natural world and the spiritual world beyond.' – Ian McMillan, Yorkshire Post, on Marratide: Selected Poems
‘Martin’s poetic world is a multi-layered place. Ancient pilgrim paths are overlaid with colliery wagonways; ritual can mean the incantation of childhood games or the grand procession of banners. [...] Martin’s vision may be firmly rooted in home soil, but it ranges widely through time and space.’ – Andy Potts, North East Bylines, on Marratide: Selected Poems
‘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
William Martin (1925-2010) was born in New Silksworth, Co. Durham, England. During the Second World War, he was a radio technician in the RAF, based near Karachi, where he was inspired by the Eastern religious and philosophical traditions. After being demobbed he became a gas fitter and later served in the Audiology Department of Sunderland Royal Infirmary, retiring as Head of Department. He lived in Sunderland for over half a century, settling there during the 1950s. He was an active member of CND for many years, taking part in the ritual boarding of nuclear submarines in Holy Loch, Scotland in 1961. He became an artist and had work purchased and exhibited by Sunderland Art Gallery. However, oil paints and a young family were not an easy combination, and poetry became his medium from the mid 1960s onwards. For some years he wrote without any recognition, but in 1971 he had a book of poetry published to commemorate the Wearmouth 1300 Festival (Tidings of our Bairnsea). This was later followed by Cracknrigg (1983) and Hinny Beata (1987) with Taxus, and Marra Familia (1993) and Lammas Alanna (2000) with Bloodaxe. His retrospective, Marratide: Selected Poems, edited by Peter Armstrong and Jake Morris-Campbell, is published by Bloodaxe in 2025.