Skirrid Hill

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The title here is an obvious aural pun on ‘father’, suggesting that there were still things left for the father and son left to do together. The ‘elephant’s graveyard of cars’ is a potent image within the collection as it reminds us of Mametz Wood. The ground is gradually purging itself of the manmade impositions (it was dead bodies and their uniforms in the first poem, now it is ‘dead’ abandoned cars). 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? The idea that the bird is attractive because she looks like an ‘oil spill’ is an interesting modern shadow hanging over the poem – Sheers wrote this poem in a society in which wars were being fought in countries under the basic premise that the USA wanted to take oil from Eastern countries..

So the poem begins with a woman in the process of dressing, as with ‘Landmarks’. However, beneath the defences of her clothes, beneath her very skin, lies a sign of something that is set to undo her life. It is interesting that Sheers chooses to describe the lump as a ‘mote’. One assumes he is referring to the size and shape of a grain cooked in water, but it is hard not to think that he is aiming at the aural match with the word ‘moat’, which points us towards the ‘Hill Fortification’ earlier on in the poem, a once-strong thing that eventually crumbled like the woman’s tumour soon will. There is the possible thematic link with ‘valentine’ in the sailing connotations that swallows have – swallows being seen as a good omen as they indicate a nearness to land.The happiness may well come from the reminder that ultimately nature will always overpower the strength of men, perhaps belittling the fears they have of war and the men on the opposing side. The title here clearly gives us connotations of insincerity and role-play, echoing the ‘Last Act’ of the collection’s start. This is a morally ambiguous aspect to Sheers’ writing though – the woman has managed to live for longer using medicines, something which Jean Sheers refused in ‘On Going’. There is no simple moral stance taken by Sheers on whether it is right to defy nature with artificial means – the equilibrium between man and nature is a complex balance in this collection. 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: Sun City West could be described as an aging community past its prime in a way that we can compare to the Steelworks, the Hill Fort, the Landmark or any other examples of things that we can see wasting away over time.

This, in many ways, mimics the farrier, in that it is an intimate physical act between a male and female whereby the female comes off permanently scarred. We might link this idea to that of childbirth in the way that Sheers writes ‘we worked up that scar’ – a thing that the two of them did together that left its mark on only her body. We started the collection with a depiction of a stage just after a play, and now as we near the end of the book we have a depiction of a theatre during the daytime, before a play. All this contributes to tie together all the elements of ‘role playing’ that we find in this collection – in Sheers’ writing, nobody is who they seem to be and nobody is capable of doing anything without some degree of pretence. 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 quotation itself ties in with the ideas of national identity in this collection – by depicting a flag as a ‘vital organ’ we get the sense that everyone feels the need to belong somewhere, and so it is vital to the Welsh people that Wales retains a sense of national identity so that its inhabitants aren’t left feeling ‘homeless’. 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.

Heaney & Sheers: A Panel Discussion for Schools

The theme of magic appears again in this poem, as the artist is described as ‘conjuring with bulb’ in the creative process. It seems as though Sheers draws a clear distinction between male magic and female magic in this collection – male magic is an instinctive thing that involves doing impressive things subconsciously. Female magic is more of a contrived way of creating the illusion of attractiveness. In her review of his last collection, Zoe Brigley suggested that Sheers was following in a long line of misogynistic Welsh poets. Decide for yourself! 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. 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. The most famous of the metaphysical poems is John Donne’s The Flea… a poem where a man notices a flea has bitten him and then goes onto bite a lady. He suggests that because their blood has been mingled inside the flea, then they are practically married and may as well have sex.