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 While Skirrid Hill has its moments, Carrie Etter wishes Owen Sheers would learn to trust his readers more.


Skirrid Hill
Owen Sheers

Seren
£7.99 Paperback
ISBN 1854114034


A prefatory note about the title of Owen Sheers’ second collection relates that skirrid comes "from the Welsh Ysgyrid, a derivation of Ysgariad meaning divorce or separation." More broadly than this note may suggest, Skirrid Hill concerns loss and our vulnerability to it, such that a sense of fragility runs through the volume.

   "Mametz Wood," the first poem, intelligently signals Skirrid Hill’s more inclusive sense of divorce or separation. In the battle of the Somme in 1916, the 38th Welsh Division fought for five days to take the wood, resulting in 4,000 casualties, including approximately 600 killed. The poem imagines farmers finding the dead soldiers "for years afterwards" as pieces of bone emerge from the soil and concludes with the discovery of twenty skeletons in single long grave,

and their jaws, those that have them,
dropped open.
As if the notes they had sung
have only now, with this unearthing,
slipped from their absent tongues.

   The mention of song refers back to the poem itself as a commemoration and suggests the potential of Skirrid Hill, in its general focus on loss, to do the same.

   Yet "Mametz Wood," by leaving the soldiers anonymous and focusing on the relationship between the earth and their bones, remains a "poet’s poem" with its detached perspective. While that work is nonetheless effective for such an approach, one of Skirrid Hill’s most significant weaknesses arises from Poetry’s occlusion of palpable feeling. By capital–P Poetry I mean elaborate phrasing, extended metaphors, and end rhyme, all potentially splendid in themselves but often foregrounded in these poems in such a way as to diminish their emotional power. This emphasis on Poetry, at the expense of feeling, is most destructive among the love poems. "Winter Swans," for example, makes the clichéd comparison between a human couple and a pair of swans. It opens interestingly with ostensible tension, as man and woman walk apart around a lake, but declines quickly into the predictable when the swans’ union renews the couple’s attachment, beginning with the lover’s unnecessary declaration, "They mate for life." The poem preciously ends:

I noticed our hands, that had,
somehow swum the distance
between us and folded, one over the
other, like a pair of wings settling
after flight.

   Not content merely to suggest the analogy between the swans and the couple, Sheers keeps urging the point home, extending the conceit through the hands "swimming the distance" and coming together "like a pair of wings settling after flight." All in all, so much is made of the comparison that the speaker and his lover seem stock characters and hence generate little interest or sympathy.

   The same problem daunts "Keyways." Here, the speaker is having his ex–lover’s keys copied so he can remove his things when she is out, and this leads to the speaker’s musing about the comparison between a key fitting a lock and the speaker fitting the lover. When they met, he felt like "an uncut key" "waiting [her] impression," until, later, their "keyways" fit. When the relationship deteriorates, both are equated to keys for which the other acts as the lock, as "one of [them] made a turn that failed to dock." Throughout, the conceit’s prominence undermines the seeming authenticity of the feeling, as the speaker appears more interested in the vehicle than the tenor. That could be the point—a speaker so interested in analysing the relationship that he loses sight of the thing itself, but nothing else about the speaker in the poem implies as much. Thus while "Keyways" offers an array of affinities between the nature of keys and the nature of the couple, these connections are not insightful but predictable, as when their sleep, with the speaker’s chest to the lover’s back, proves "a master key fit."
  
   This disproportionate stress on the vehicle of a metaphor appears to be part of a larger problem in Skirrid Hill: an apparent lack of trust in the reader to understand or in the poet to be able to convey his intended meaning. A number of poems have the structure of situation–interpretation; that is, the poem describes a situation and then explains the meaning of that situation for the poet. This structure manifests in the companion poems "Y Gaer (The Hill Fort)" and "The Hill Fort (Y Gaer)," as well as in "Intermission"; the latter’s last three stanzas read:

You speak from the shore of the
other chair,
saying all you really want is to live
long enough to be good at the oboe

and remembering a fly I saw that
morning, vibrating across the
window like a tattooist’s needle
towards the slip of space that was air
not glass,

I think I understand.
That it is after all the small victories
that matter, that are in the end,
enough.

How much more powerfully this poem would have ended, had its last words been "I think I understand." Instead, the connection between oboe–playing and the escaping fly becomes subsumed in the hackneyed "small victories," undercutting their potential suggestiveness.

   Skirrid Hill engages most when the speaker fully inhabits a discrete experience and the poem uses metaphor only in touches. Blackberrying is common enough poetic material; yet "Hedge School," describing the speaker’s boyhood self blackberrying on the walk home from his school bus stop, reveals its significance through those circumstances. First describing the blackberrying as "another lesson" in the boy’s experimentation with ways of eating the fruit and with degrees of ripeness, the poem becomes more urgent as the experience leaves the analytical for the physical, as the boy "hoard[s] them":

Piling in the palm until I cupped a
coiled black pearl necklace, a
hedgerow caviar, the bubbles of just
poured wine stilled in my fingers
which I’d take together, each an eye
of one great berry, a sudden
symphony.

The physicality of collecting the berries in the hand builds to an instance where the boy, rather than eating them, "slowly close[s] [his] palm into a fist instead, / dissolving their mouthfeel over [his]skin." In this way, "Hedge School" convincingly and powerfully evokes the boy’s experience such that the reader vicariously shares in it. Sheers’ poems succeed when they seem the least laboured, relying on a spare narrative, lush description and a strong sense of rhythm to propel the poem. Here’s hoping his third collection contains a larger proportion of such work.