What is there still to be said about the Black Country?

It has a history that long precedes the Industrial Revolution. Its compacting of ores and burnable carbon, along with clay to build with, made it the birthplace of industrial capitalism. The distinct dialect lends itself to its humour (think – say the most awful thing you can think of and everybody may well laugh.) Shouldn’t the region be allowed to rest in undiscovered tranquillity, content to be re-cast and built over by a modern economy, its features buried under contemporary development?

Not according to RM Francis. To him, our exploration of the region has just begun. He looks to absolute origins, and these lie beneath what is visible. His subject is the land itself – what lies beneath the goat-willow that populates much of the former-mining, now re-wilded areas of the region. It is the underlying geology, which gave rise to technological advances three centuries ago, and the mushrooming of population that followed, that interests Francis.

I had previously wondered about Dudley, with its recorded 400 mine-shafts, and whether living on top of such a mass of carbon energy, not to mention metal, affected the way people were, and I had become. Expressing this view to the bookshop’s customers won me polite attention; to ‘regular’ Keith Taylor, former Baggeridge miner and from there on self-educated Geologist, my theories smacked too much of the speculative, even the romantic. In my own home they earned no more than a moment’s consideration while others raised on the coalfield have been similarly dismissive. So I ‘buried’ such thoughts for a few years.

Contemporary poetry assumes the immediate availability of Google so that mythological references, laboriously footnoted in the past, can now immediately be accessed and understood by the reader. Francis’s writing, though the references will be to Natural Science and Literary Theory, nevertheless requires the reader’s commitment. Even without such supplementary information however, the scale of the poet’s ambition becomes clear. It is the ground beneath us, that has determined settlement and activity, that is asking for our engagement and wonder. To us it will give back new understanding and creative energy.

English poets have, since William Wordsworth, investigated and drawn on this natural world, the indefinable presence or animus one feels at times alone in the natural landscape. In his poem Nutting, after the speaker has violated the sanctity of the most hidden, most inaccessible quarter of the wood, the encounter is with something that loves – or love itself.

… I beheld
The silent trees, and saw the intruding sky.—
Then, dearest Maiden, move along these shades
In gentleness of heart; with gentle hand
Touch—for there is a spirit in the woods.

His successors moved deep into ‘nature’ as it was broadly understood. There was reference to a Classical figure – the Muse, whose demands of service were absolute, and who could never be summoned at will. William Blake though, abjured any notion of nature as benign, asking the question of his ‘Tyger’,

What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

Indicating the terror of what has been created, how much more ‘fearful’ must its creator be? Later in the 19th Century Gerard Manley Hopkins was to see suggestions of transcendent beauty in a bird, a ‘windhover’ or kestrel. A century later Ted Hughes’ encounter with nature told of a ferocity quite beyond human comprehension. ‘Terrifying the attent sleek thrushes on the lawn.’ Throughout Hughes’ oeuvre there is only brief existence – life – surrounded by endless death. No mitigating deity. There is only the relentless onrush of creation, blind, inhuman - the sentient human being an accident, like so much else, in this march of destiny.

I dare to venture that Francis and the Geopoetics movement to which he belongs may be a step forward from Hughes and his cohort. To these modern-day interpreters such spirit-of-the-land encounters do not prompt epiphanies such as Hopkins’ …fire that breaks from thee then, a billion / Times told lovelier, more dangerous’ but from an exact knowledge of the landscape we inhabit. That knowledge does not preclude knowing of community, history and language, but is firmly based in Natural Science. Our land, more than anything, gave us our present and – how old is that land? Geology provides all the answers. Of the 400 million-year formation of the Black Country landscape, many mementoes remain. Our human despoliation of it represents a tiny fraction of that vast stretch of time. When we are gone, the period of the Anthropocene will be detectable by a few millimetres in the still-evolving masses of rock.

It is places then, to which we should look, to unlock the grandeur of the universe we inhabit. Equipped with the geological knowledge to understand fully these locations, we gain perspective and new energy. From this wonderment will come verse, and from verse, self-perception. Gaining such collective identity, all troubles fade.

The Chain Coral Chorus serves as much more than an introduction to local geology, or to Geology itself. Rob Francis’ pared-down verse excites the imagination to a shared vision of our locality, in new relief. The dialect that addresses us seems to stem from mighty formations and aeons of time. We, the readers, are cast in the role of ‘me wench’ , who says ‘iss just a rock’ in the same way innocent and unknowing.

…Yo’m
right, me wench,
an’ thass the rub,
iss just a rock, beginning
as mixed minerals moulded
filtered, crushed in crust plates
along the axis formin’ leaves
’a foliation.

This voice, out of time and the landscape itself, is interspersed through this collection, a collection part-manifesto for a new poetry, where Literary Theory, Psychology and History merge in a series of essays – this voice, teaching us, inspiring us to look again.