. The second in our Forward Prizes for Poetry interview series. .
. . Fady: Your book can’t be unseen, literally: the poems are enhanced by the photographs, and the photographs bring the text to life.
How did you come up with the idea of accompanying the poems with photographs and what do you think its impact is? Sarah: ‘Can’t be unseen’, that is a lovely phrase. Well, in 2021, my collection Shelling Peas with My Grandmother in the Gorgiolands was in the process of being pulled together. It was such an exciting moment.
After years of absorbing the craft of poetry, my first full collection was due to be released in 2022 with the fantastic publisher Bloodaxe Books . We decided to include a group of poems about British coal-mining culture and the miners’ strike of 1984-85 towards the end of the collection; in fact, the final poem in Shelling Peas..
. became the lead poem in STRIKE . It was this process of gathering coal poems which made me more mindful of the 40th strike anniversary forthcoming in 2024.
I decided that I MUST write some kind of pamphlet to commemorate such a landmark event. Whatever I created had to be respectful of the trauma that those communities suffered during the strike year, so I applied for a Society of Authors’ Foundation Grant to buy me time to be able to write it well. I was lucky to be awarded a grant and began writing in 2022.
By the time I had written a chunk of poems most publishers didn’t have any slots left but the punchy indie, Stai.