Skirrid Hill

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Movements’ in this sense can be seen as episodes which follow different emotional tones, rhythms and narratives, but essentially tell different parts of the same story. Music and poetry are often very closely linked, and so this sequence here encourages us to make comparisons between the two. Most noticeably perhaps, the different stanza lengths may well be interpreted as different time signatures. The ‘making me realise’ part echoes the section of ‘Hill Fort’ where Sheers writes ‘I think I understand’… we get the definite sense that his poetry is his only way of coming to terms with the world and understanding it. T.S. Eliot (we are going to be hearing a lot about him as we move through this collection) began his most famous poem (The Waste Land) with a quotation from Chaucer. By following in Eliot’s footsteps, Sheers continues to put himself in line with the poetic canon. Again, we have this combination of expert delicacy and care taken to alter the natural course of the animals’ lives – in this case taking away their eggs. This is perhaps the least harmful example of this however.

Another subtle link in this poem is the way that the woman’s ‘slow blink’ mirrors Sheers’ as described in ‘Inheritance’. The woman’s ‘slow blink’ appears to be a deliberate gesture, whereas Sheers’ ‘tired blink’ is an involuntary mannerism. The comparison we may therefore make is that there is sometimes a convergence between the real and the contrived, and it can be difficult to distinguish between the natural and the man-made. Still with me? Excellent… this is where the collection starts showing off just what Sheers is capable of. Here we have our first hint of the uneasiness in male/female relationships in the collection. It is important that it is a female horse – use of the pronoun ‘she’ encourages us to extend the horse as a representation of all females. The camera-man described with ‘his finger on the trigger’ makes a stark contrast to Capa in ‘Happy Accidents’ who does not have all day to sit waiting for the perfect shot. The idea of role play is further developed in Sheers’ treatment of the doctor – ‘his practiced look of concern and the slow pace of his voice’.By the end of the poem though, we feel sympathetic toward the horse who feels discomfort at walking on unnatural ground in unnatural shoes. This works as both a comment on man’s alteration of nature as well as the ways that women’s lives are effected by men – the awkward sound of the horse walking reflects the high heels of Sheers’ lover later on in the collection – high heels being a representation of women’s need to dress up for their men? It is also entirely incongruent with the collection in terms of imagery, because it is one of the few pieces that draws relations between people and man-made objects – in the rest of the collection, most parallels are drawn between the world of man and the world of nature. Sheers compounds the comparison of this place with Mametz Wood, when he describes his friend’s passed father as ‘a poppy sown in the unripe corn’. The clear semantic links between poppies and the First World War, along with the car-names being described as the ‘names of the dead’ give us the sense that the War is an unshakeable image for Sheers and its effect on Wales extends far beyond the Somme. It also heightens the tension between man and nature as being almost warlike – the ongoing battle between the two is a key theme here. Note: Sheers’ preferred stanza-structure is triplet. He writes in triplets here but they are interrupted by one-line stanzas as if to deliberately interrupt the progress of the poem itself. You will find other examples in this collection where Sheers interrupts his natural triplets to create a break or sense that something has stopped working.

These are similar sentiments, which are also congruent with the idea that ‘bodies, like souls, only exist when touched’ in ‘Four Movements’. The common thread of these is that Sheers believes that the moral complexities of life can be surmounted by following the belief that people can only be ‘good’ or ‘important’ to the world in the way that they effect the lives of others. One becomes a positive person by being positive towards others. When you read this poem, think about the popular platitude about things that don’t kill you making you stronger.The fact that such elegant understatement is the exception rather than the rule in Skirrid Hill is the collection's only real weakness. If Sheers's poetry has a flaw, it lies in his propensity to over-explicate at times. Take for example the final lines of "The Wake", a deeply felt poem in which an older man - a grandfather, I assumed - explains to the poet that he is dying. The poem ends with the pair taking their leave of one another. As they wave goodbye, the poet recognises that: The Pardoner’s Prologue involves the ‘Pardoner’ speaking directly to his audience before telling his tale. He tells his audience of the sins that he has committed and what a depraved life he has lead. It shows us that the sort of stories that are told are always influenced by the person telling them (ie. bad people tell stories about bad people). This clearly links in with Sheers’ tone in this poem, as he is telling us ‘just how dark he runs inside’. The title of this piece serves a variety of functions. Firstly, it makes an allusion to the Welsh novel of the same name by Raymond Williams. The novel is about a Welsh academic in London returning home when his father suffers a stroke. This ties in with the poet’s dealing with family loss. The tension of this poem is in the playful, carefree nature of the young boys with the funereal, morbid imagery to describe the place. We almost get the sense that the ‘buzzards above’ the children are waiting for the right moment to scavenge the passed remains of their very childhood. The ‘Swansea gym’ we encountered in ‘Flag’ is resurrected here in the imagery of the labourers in the lifting bays. Their work is seen as a form of exercise, ‘pressing and dipping’, ‘rolling a bicep up an arm’, ‘lateral pull’ and ‘pumping iron under the strip lights’. The suggestion seems to be here that the men, now they can no longer take pride in their country, have started to take pride in their physical appearance and go about their manual tasks in the name of vanity rather than productivity.

Waiting Staff: These are the least skilled of the workers in this poem, and so could be taken to represent the least skilled workers in society as a whole. Waiters are simply concerned with transporting goods from one place to another, and so could be taken to represent anyone whose trade involves transport. Just as with the ‘hocus pocus’ in ‘Show’, the woman’s beauty is derived from her ‘jewellery’ and her ‘blue-painted eyes’. The difference is that Hunzvi is clearly content with this strain of beauty and satisfied to live in a fake world of ‘asked-for laughter’ having emotionally ingenuine interactions with all around him. In ‘Show’ however, the speaker is clearly not satisfied with the woman who looks like a model, for they have a falling out in the next poem. So, in what sense has the poet become ‘lost to man’? It could be argued that this is the implication that by leaving his hometown and going travelling, he is ‘lost’ to the myriad vices that lurk beyond the safety of the small rural community. ‘Lost to man’ could simply mean that his father is saddened that his son is no longer the innocent child he once was and has been subjected to the various evils of the world. As in ‘Mametz Wood’, Sheers does not criticize the soldiers themselves, but those who lead them into the situations that they faced. The American major is shown as an arrogant figure who ignores all prior warning from maps and farmers that they are about to set up camp in a dangerous, flood-prone, area. The idea that the poet feels that he ‘should have known’ what his father was trying to say by planting the oak further highlights the gap between their personalities. Sheers, a man of words, is likely to be less oblique in his communication, yet he accepts that his father is a more taciturn character, less likely to share his grievances.

Seamus Heaney and Owen Sheers: Connections, Contexts, Interpretations

This later turns out to be easier said than done however, as Sheers shows us that in our day to day lives, we are always playing roles in some sense.