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The Orgreave Stations
William Hershaw, Culture Matters, £10
THE 40th anniversary of the British miners’ strike appears in more than one piece of writing this year.
Willy Hershaw has chosen to frame his poems about it with the Stations of the Cross. These are a Christian set of images portraying Jesus on his way to crucifixion, set up in Jerusalem for pilgrims to walk along around the 15th century. Oddly, you can still hire your own cross and follow this Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem, and groups of tourists do. Later the stations were reproduced in very many churches, initially by Franciscan monks, and standardised into a set of 14 by the Vatican in 1731.
The appropriation of Christian imagery by artists and writers is not uncommon, from the Soviet poet Alexander Blok’s The Twelve (1918) to James Kirkup’s The Love That Dares Speak Its Name (1976), which was successfully prosecuted for blasphemy.
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