Bringing history alive in poems is no easy task, particularly so when the times being addressed are so far from today. So I have the utmost admiration for poets who can weave historical research into readable, listenable poetry without letting facts overpower the poetic magic.

I was recently invited to join an online poetry-book reading group and I’ve very much enjoyed the meetings I’ve attended. For the last one, the book which one member of the group had proposed was The Lost Book of Barkynge by Ruth Wiggins (available from the publisher, Shearsman, here). It’s like nothing I’ve ever read before. It brings into the light a succession of nuns and other women associated with Barking Abbey from the Seventh Century to the Dissolution. Each poem is headed by a scene-setting ‘hic’ and has extensive end-notes; yet what could be an arid reading experience is surmounted by a refreshing variety of forms and personae. It is a truly extraordinary book. To read it, one would’ve thought it had taken decades to write, but, amazingly, Wiggins says, in an interview, here, that it started as a lockdown project. In how it reclaims otherwise lost, suppressed or hidden voices, it’s uniquely beautiful.

On a similar note, I was lucky a few months ago to see Bob Beagrie read his poems at the Well Spoken poetry night in Doncaster. As well as being a fantastic, passionate reader of his work, Bob also conjures poetry out of neglected history. In his second set, he read from Civil Insolencies, available here, which, as the blurb says, ‘tells the dramatic story of the Battle of Guisborough in North Yorkshire on 16 January 1643, when parliamentary soldiers defeated Royalist forces in order to secure the crossings over the River Tees.’ Like Wiggins’s book, it revels in historical language and thought. It differs, though, by containing deliberate, but sparingly and well-chosen anachronisms in epigraphs and in some of the text, reminding me of Hill’s Mercian Hymns.

Both books live up ancient, stony tracks off B-roads of the poetry mainstream and are surely all the better for doing so.