'This compelling collection of poems, based loosely on his grandparents’ hard-lived lives as welsh miners, proves Nigel Jarrett to be master of his own voice. These honed, varied poems, with their strikingly original and accurate images and bigness of vision, capture eras still in living memory, including the two world wars, not only in Wales’s history, but also in England’s. Jarrett, in this virtuoso performance, offers the reader brilliant, driven testimonies to ways of life both gone and carrying on.' – Patricia McCarthy, Agenda Poetry
‘as a music critic by profession, Jarrett has a marvellous ear...’ – Guardian
Miners at the Quarry Pool is a collection of above and below – and nearly every space in between. From the dizzying heights of photographs taken from an aeroplane to the miners just delivered from their daily work, the collection is an unapologetic, yet satisfying examination of the spaces we inhabit and our existence within those spaces.
Survival, depression, family, friendship, nostalgia, war, love, and death – each are incisively carved a niche in Miners at the Quarry Pool. Nothing is neglected in this collection; toil and trains take a place among trees and devices of torture – even the courtesies of wearing a hat merit examination. ‘See a world in a grain of sand’, wrote William Blake; Miners at the Quarry Pool is not far off the achievement.
Nigel Jarrett is a former daily-newspaperman and a double prizewinner: the Rhys Davies award and the inaugural Templar Shorts award, both for short fiction. Funderland, his début story collection from Parthian, was warmly received in the Guardian, the Independent, and the Times, among several others; it was also long-listed for the Edge Hill prize. He's had eight books published, including four story collections, two volumes of poetry, a novel, and a fictional memoir. He co-edited a collection of Arthur Machen's journalism, writes and reviews for Jazz Journal and Acumen poetry magazine, and was a lead writer for Wales Arts Review. For many years, he was chief music critic of the South Wales Argus.