Review: The Exile's House by Ian Parks (Waterloo Press). The Morning Star

First Published in the Morning Star on 18/10/2012.

'HELMETS in the sunlight, push of pike, a trampling down by horses in the mire. Except this was high summer, and the middle of the strike.'

With its pikes, helmets and cavalry, Ian Parks's Orgreave steeps its reader in the motifs of a bygone feudal clash.

The word "strike" itself works as a kind of volta, turning our heads from ancient battles to recent realities - the Battle of Orgreave in 1984 - when police attempted the violent suppression of industrial action by South Yorkshire miners.

Shields turn from the mirrored steel of medieval knights to the translucent perspex of the police, illuminating a murky chapter of recent history.

That Parks should carry us with a single flourish from feudal Britain to 20th-century class struggle comes as no surprise.

As a Mexborough-born miner's son he was active on the picket lines of the 1980s and many of the things he witnessed inform the poetry in The Exile's House, a title which itself speaks of political dissent.

The collection is peppered with allusions to Yorkshire's industrial past, from the abandoned pithead of The Wheel to the working men's clubs where Parks's father sang Sinatra in Standards.

Parks is particularly good at navigating a path between nostalgia and defiance. The Wheel performs another poetic rotation when it snaps from past tense reflections to future menace: "We'll drag it from the valley floor,/aim it at the cities of the south,/set the wheel in motion, watch it roll."

This vigour and conviction translates so well into his poetry, which goes some way to explaining his continued association with the Morning Star.

When Orgreave was first published in the paper's Well Versed column last year it attracted a Poetry Kit award.

Parks's poetic attachment to the abandoned and the dispossessed resonates strongly with our present struggles.