Barnsley Soundscape: The Place Is You By Kay Buckley

The tomographic appearance of leafless trees in winter yields a ‘neural’ map: against the background of a dying afternoon’s sun, they can look a little like the filigree branchings of a cerebral cortex on brain scans. The junctions and conjunctions, the ‘synaptic’ connections become metaphors, not only for a sense of rootedness, of growth and of purpose, but also of heredity: the mapping of a tree or a human mind is the visible palimpsest of an earlier incarnation, traced in silhouette beneath.

The closeness of the late Kay Buckley’s identification with the hinterland of her origins is as palpable as to make an indivisibility of her poems and that which formed them. And in ‘Dodworth Road’, which gives a sizeable clue to the location of her formative terrain, she nails her own inclusive map, of family history and of landscape, to the pages of posterity:

‘Our family can be mapped on one
single road. I carry it around as I
walk the same road. My own map
printed over hers.’

The anchoring of person to place and of a woman to her own past is examined so thoroughly, and in so many forms and dimensions in Buckley’s striking collection of poems that we can sense the emergence of a cohesive unitary style, a compelling architecture of words constructed in layered accretions. Curated by literary editor Suzannah Evans in the wake of Buckley’s death, the poems that make up The Place is You were hitherto uncollected, although several notable examples appeared in earlier publications. With the help of the poet’s family, Evans has shaped a fitting memorial to the poet’s life, yet the work is idiosyncratically Kay Buckley’s own and the poems are durable monuments to the latter’s facility for refracting pain, elegy and a deep sense of heimat through a prismatic realisation of her South Yorkshire home.

And if we hear the elegiac voices of Peter Sansom, and more especially Sarah Wimbush, in the interstitial fabric of Buckley’s poems, it is because they are cut from similar cloth. A declaration of working class identity, of peculiarly local pride, and an acknowledgment of shared history, the work of bonding outpaces nostalgia and sentiment in such capable hands: the Barnsley of Buckley, like the Doncaster of Wimbush, is as roughshod and symbolically-riven as a disused pithead.

But you never doubt the sincerity of her voice. Emergent, like a ‘soul-bruise’, her instinct for home is rendered the more electric when approached from elsewhere. Coming over the Pennines from Manchester, Buckley feels the lightning of home as though directed by the sky-tearing and ever-present television mast high above Huddersfield:

‘Emley Moor’s charge finds its counter magnet within you.
All compass points lead here.’ (‘The Journeywoman’s Tale’)

As totemic as Blackpool Tower used to be for the droves of Yorkshire holidaymakers who ventured West over the moors during Wakes Weeks, the mast at Emley remains a signifier, a locator, a colossal repository of emotional discharge. As, too, are the details of a ‘tarn’ in decline, whose promise of ‘charity / shops, boozers and banks’ are thin compensation for the powerful whiff of loss that infuses the poem ‘Preloved’. Here, an earlier mapping of memory is sewn into the ‘Singer’s / cotton and silk’ of a used wedding dress, and the image of innocent love that follows it is one of rare, imperishable beauty:

‘Broderie Anglaise dancing
like Cabbage Whites as they
circle each other at dusk.’

The picture is as pristine as the subject demands. An intensely visual experience, her words are pared back, movingly eloquent in their simplicity. Subordinating form to the greater necessity of making the personal political, and the political personal, Buckley’s work is just that – an effort of will that transforms the onrush of memories and observations into a disclosure of love. And in truth, the upheavals and social changes effected in her own lifetime are the endgame of an experience collectively shared for generations: the pit villages turned inside out by explosions and accidents over many generations, the wounding of the landscape, and the massacre of a cohesive sense of purpose on the altar of Thatcherism, are components of a grievance that still resonates. That Buckley resolutely refuses to separate the brutal arc of change from the intrinsic beauty of the quotidian is one measure of her unusually instinctive acuity.


cq[And in truth, the upheavals and social changes effected in her own lifetime are the endgame of an experience collectively shared for generations...]
And of her anger: the complex and wise triptych, ‘Misterium’, which hints at a coven of the supportive, of the ‘helpmeets’, of a newly risen world overturned by the Miners’ Strike, where women came into their ironic own in its wake, as if the end of the pits was an antic Saturnalian performance. And so it is, that the ‘hell-mouth / opening up like[…] subsidence’ presides over a new subverted order where men mash tea, make sandwiches for their wives, and wield dust pans and brushes. But if we were inclined to infer a weakening of socio-cultural bonds in this world of upturned gender mores, the power of Buckley’s final quatrain dispels the notion in flames of retribution, whose consummation is both desired and entirely communal:

‘Outside the Rusty Dudley we meet.
The guilds are gone, but I know my part.
Someone lights a fire. The Lady’s not for turning,
but tonight she’ll be burning’.

E. P. Thompson saw something of the same in the Luddite movement in The Making of the English Working Class; the ‘clandestine’ meeting outside the Rusty Dudley is oddly familiar, and the action taken invigoratingly direct.

Buckley’s proclivity for testing formal approaches animates her poems, and in a sense her skill and desire, her urge to convey the multivalent experiences of connectedness, are extensions of the kind of urge to speak out that fired the miners’ wives in 1984. The shortening of metre at the beginning and end of several of the quatrains of the fine, prizewinning poem, ‘Huskar’, give pause for reflection in a harrowingly effective narrative of loss and collective remembrance. Huskar is the mining class’s pronunciation of House Carr Colliery and the distinction between the two names distinguishes, in the affiliated Harrisonian sense of ‘uz’, the coal-getters, trappers and hurriers from the mine owners. The working class demotic is significant, preparing the way for a simple description of the innocence of childhood forever blackened by the memory of a storm that flooded the pit and drowned 26 children – girls and boys – on the 4th July, 1838. Buckley’s profoundly affecting descriptions are resonant because restrained, eloquent because understated, reminding the reader, inevitably, of Larkin’s ‘Explosion’:

‘Electric in their stomachs jolts
through limbs to clamber up a day hole,
day eyes to the sky; tunnelling
home to blackcurrants and bread’.

Blakean symbolisms of a cleaving towards sunlight, of subsistent repasts, and of larking boys and girls, are repaid in ‘clouds-clamped skies’ and coal cocoons; and the pity that is distilled is tempered, no less than that of E. P. Thompson’s, on a whetstone of injustice.

cq[Journalistic in tone, the poem is a work of studied understatement which builds by suggestion, yielding the social and political zeitgeist of the past forty years from the perspective of a commentator...]

One can sense it in the millstone grits in Buckley’s interpretation. The riveting of the skies with ‘steel bolts of blue’ in ‘Belt It’ draws the people beneath into a charmed circle with their landscape and their industry. The racket of storms outplayed by the din of the loom, the graft of labour forming an exterior as hard as coal, as ‘brewed’ in the bones as ‘tea and beer’, amalgamate to resist intrusion: ‘If you cannot feel it here / you’re not from round ‘ere’’. Amongst the finest examples of her work in this collection are Buckley’s poems of the natural world, whose presence here reinforces her own connection with this part of Yorkshire. From the ‘Pogmoor Olmenack 1843’, whose vernacular reading of the seasons as retailed by an early Victorian is both funny, and oddly persuasive, to the bounds and crosses that circumscribe the borders of villages in a simulacrum, almost, of our wider instinct for ‘home’ (‘Beating the Bounds’), this poet’s acute intuition is a lighting conductor for ancient local cultures and forgotten byways.

Buckley’s use of language – she harnesses archaisms, dialect and occasionally Latin for different purposes – is fitting for a writer whose feeling for the rich seams that underpin regional cultures and the terrain that supports them is extremely nuanced. The Bildungsroman of the aptly-named long poem ‘Opus Anglicanum’ begins at a Miner’s Gala in Barnsley in 1981 before taking us to Durham University in 1992, to London in the same year, thence to Barnsley in 2014. Journalistic in tone, the poem is a work of studied understatement which builds by suggestion, yielding the social and political zeitgeist of the past forty years from the perspective of a commentator, whose biography the narrative bespeaks. A poem of real beauty, Buckley’s poem is filmic, delivering a series of images of a nation in cultural turmoil as the frames unfold, from the ‘tracky tops and junior flares’ of innocence, to the politicisation of college years, to the residua of the Miners’ Unions on display in the museums of working class memory. What the poet studiously omits of the events of ’84, is rendered, instead, in slogans whose early echoes fade as the story retreats into the distant past, like a band marching slowly away:

‘A miner and his lamp still shines out Pensions
and a 5 Day Week to kids whose parents are on
zero hour contracts. Walk through long grass,
pick a blade; sharpen it until its root is clean.
Listen. The wind is the only winding shaft.’