Full Description
In Shelling Peas with My Grandmother in the Gorgiolands Sarah Wimbush journeys through myth and memory with poetry rooted in Yorkshire. From fireside tales of Romany Gypsies and Travellers, through pit villages and the haunt of The Miners' Strike, to the subliminal of the everyday - including poems about typists, pencil sharpeners and learning to drive in a Ford Capri. This highly accomplished debut collection explores what it means to belong, what it means to be on the margins. This is poetry written in praise of family and community and those qualities which make us human: love, language and, most of all, resilience.
Sarah Wimbush is a Leeds poet who hails from Doncaster. She has published two pamphlets, Bloodlines (2020), winner of the Mslexia/PBS Poetry Pamphlet Competition 2019, which was also shortlisted in the Michael Marks Awards, and The Last Dinosaur in Doncaster (Smith|Doorstop, 2021), a winner of the Poetry Business Book and Pamphlet Competition in 2020. Shelling Peas with My Grandmother in the Gorgiolands is her first book-length collection.
Contents
I
11 House
12 White Cottage
13 Shelling Peas with My Grandmother in the Gorgiolands
14 Mother Tongue
16 Dukkering
17 Carroty Kate
18 Gran Violet Applies a Poultice
19 Gal
20 The Hedgehog's Tale
21 John Thomas
22 Pitched early mornin' at encampment o' Gypsy king Esau Smith
23 Scrapping at Marshall's Engineering, Gainsborough
24 I can see Sandbeck Hall
25 Them Dunstan Kids
26 Our Jud
27 Threshin'
28 Straw Ticks
29 Bedsheet
30 Meat Puddin'
31 Laneham Ferry
32 The Bittern
33 The Calling Basket
34 A Sund'y in Worksop
35 Late Afternoon by a Hedge
36 Census 1911
37 Earring
38 The Ring
39 Walking Girl
40 The Astronaut Who Came to Tea
42 In the Library
43 Gifts
44 Bloodlines
II
46 Pilgrim Queens
47 Things My Mother Taught Me
48 Inside Lingerie
49 2:15 at Doncaster
50 The Pencil Sharpener
51 Giant Leaping
52 I learned to drive in a metallic blue Ford Capri
53 Visiting My Aunt on Her Birthday, 1st September 1979
54 Uncle Reg
55 Between Mary Berry's Baking Bible and My Class Enjoys Cooking
56 Rebel
57 A Spring Morning
58 Vixen
59 Pompocali
60 Trip to the National Portrait Gallery, with the wife
61 The Powder-monkey's Apprentice
62 Peasholm Park
63 Blood Sugar
64 William Shaw is lowered down the shaft
65 Hillards
66 STOP!
67 Rosso Youthy 1984
68 Near Extinction
70 Markham Main
71 The York, Edlington
72 The Lost
74 Our Language
77 Acknowledgements
