Skirrid Hill

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Again, note the delicacy with which the animals are mutilated ‘a man milking / two soaped beans into a delicate purse, / while gesturing with his other / for the tool, a pliers in reverse.’ The symbolism of delicacy carried out with one hand, whilst the other hand brings in an instrument of self-serving damage can be read as a metaphor for humanity itself – we are a species capable of unparalleled care, affection and finesse, yet we will destroy anything needed to preserve our way of life. Without dwelling for too much longer on this poem, let’s make a few links to the rest of the collection: The difficulty of the poem comes in the GI’s apparent happiness at being flooded however. They ‘woke from dreams of home to sense, just for a second, somewhere deep in the bone, how suitable this was’, a reaction which we certainly do not expect. So why is it that Sheers has depicted the GI’s as being happy about this flood? 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.

This is clearly a link with Seamus Heaney’s poem ‘digging’ in which the poet likens his pen to a spade. How about if we extend the metaphor of the restaurant as society as a whole even further and we have four main tiers: The farrier is an archetypal masculine, manual labouring figure, creating a contrast with those we see in the industries of service and entertainment later on in the collection (see ‘Services’ or ‘L.A. Evening’. The fact that he is smoking a roll-up suggests an extension of the values of working with hands as well as a rejection of modern innovation and the ubiquitous health warnings on the dangers of smoking; in ‘Wake’ we see a man dying of lung-cancer, as if to create a book-end to this disregard. There is nothing modern about his attire or his physical appearance, the sideburns for example.

Heaney & Sheers: A Panel Discussion for Schools

By likening the scar to ‘lovers who carve trees’, Sheers is continuing his theme of comparing that world of nature to the world of man – in this case ‘skin’ and ‘bark’ are tenor and vehicle. Still with me? Excellent… this is where the collection starts showing off just what Sheers is capable of. In The Pardoner’s Tale, Death is said to be waiting underneath an oak tree – this echoes the oak tree that his father planted in the previous poem to mark his own passing.

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. 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. 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: A clear narrative follow-on from ‘Show’ – the lovers have had an argument which links in with the idea of ‘skirrid’ as divorce.The ‘manliness’ he describes here is derived from the fact that he is doing manual labour with his grandfather – a male role model. There is the sense that each generation passes down to the next a perceived idea of what it is to be a man, and so toiling with his grandfather is not simply aligned with his perception of masculinity, but also with his own father’s. Secondly, by choosing the words ‘shoot and shoot’ to describe the taking of photographs, Sheers is aligning the photographer with the soldiers that surround him as if he has joined their ranks and is at one with them. The comment he therefore appears to be making is that group mentality is unavoidable and human beings cannot help but act with a collective consciousness in desperate situations. The atrocities done by and to military forces are simply the result of falling into a ‘trapdoor’ and an unavoidable aspect of human nature. The quotation from TS Eliot with which Sheers has chosen to preface his collection reflects, perhaps, his own awareness of the changes that have taken place in his poetry over the last five years. "As we grow older," says Eliot in The Four Quartets, "The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated / Of dead and living." After the raw energy and drive of The Blue Book, Sheers has arrived at a point of reflection; Skirrid Hill, consequently, is an altogether subtler work than its predecessor. Any loss of vigour is, however, more than made up for by a ripening of tone: Sheers's voice is noticeably firmer now, his ear more refined. In terms of prosody, too, this is a far tauter collection; the confident use of internal and sprung rhymes produces an easy lyricism, while his rhythms are wonderfully dextrous, at times so delicate as to be sensed rather than heard. It is highly conventional for modern poets to begin their collections with an epilogue – T.S. Eliot did this all the time. There are a number of reasons for doing this. Firstly, by linking to a famous, established piece of writing from the past, the poet is showing that they are fitting their work into ‘the poetic tradition’ and that their work is fit to sit next to the canon.

It is also interesting to consider that Sheers was taken under the tutelage of Andrew Motion early on in his career. Motion also writes frequently of the war and it is interesting to see how the two poets have influenced each other’s writing.

The likening of bees pollinating and the act of cunnilingus is a crude one and gives a sense of the lustful, bacchanalian side to human nature. Similarly to the farrier, we have man altering the body of an animal for his own purpose – in lambs, castration occurs to increase their size and improve their taste. Man’s interaction with nature in this collection is always almost entirely self-serving.

The idea that Hunzvi’s smile is ‘a CD selected’ also suggests that there are more CD’s from which he has to choose. By extension, every emotion or gesture made by Hunzvi has been a conscious choice, a role play perhaps, and that he is not capably of having a genuine emotional engagement with anything. Of course, the flipside of this is that, even though he may always be in control of his emotions, he is incapable of innocent happiness. Other than moving from one side to another, how does the metaphor of ‘birds flying’ and ‘writers writing’ hold up? There is the sense that both acts are beautiful, and both things allow a better perspective on things. There is also the reading that Sheers sees the act of writing, to him at least, as being just as natural as the flight of the birds. It is not essential to understand a great deal about ‘Hitler’ Hunzvi to understand this poem in the context of the collection, but just in case you’re interested… Chenjerai Hunzvi was a Zimbabwean man who went on to lead an organisation called ‘Zimbabwe National Liberation War Veterans’. The aim of the organisation was to improve conditions for those who had served in the Zimbabwean army by putting pressure on the President, Robert Mugabe. The mention of ‘bait’ in the second line may also be a reference to John Donne’s metaphysical poem ‘The Bait’ in which he describes a loved one as being like bait to him.

The link here is that these are all images that tie into sports where people pay to see men put into dangerous, potentially fatal, situations. By evoking these images, Sheers is drawing the reader’s attention to the human desire to watch the discomfort and struggle against the odds of other human beings. As the boxer, the escapologist and the matador are all quite traditional and extreme depictions of masculinity, perhaps Sheers is suggesting that the modern world has lost its manliness in the traditional sense. I see there to be a very clear case for arguing that this is potentially the ‘key poem’ in the collection, especially as we see the explicit role of actors in this collection come into play in a very important way towards the final few poems.