Owen Sheers · Skirrid Hill (Seren, 2005)
Skirrid Hill
The title is the key. Skirrid Fawr is a real hill above Abergavenny, its summit split by a long landslip; its name comes, Sheers has said, from the Welsh ysgariad, meaning divorce or separation. Sarah Crown calls the cloven hill ‘the metaphor that unites his second collection’. Almost every poem here is about a parting of some kind: lovers, fathers and sons, a language half-lost, a country divided from itself.
Sheers is a poet of landscape, and he means it strongly: poetry, he wrote, that did not so much write about landscape ‘as from within it’. The hill is not scenery but a way of thinking, its fault-line the shape of every separation in the book. Dr Catriona Coutts, whose reading Beth’s class works from, notes that ‘nearly all the poems end with the lover leaving, or with the poet alone, looking back on a shared time’. Read the collection for that recurring turn: the moment of division, and what, if anything, holds across it.
Sheers is a living poet, so this guide quotes only short phrases in order to analyse them, and never reproduces a poem. Some of the collection’s quieter poems are lightly served by published criticism; where that is so, the notes below stay close to what the poems reliably do, and your own copy of the Seren edition is the authority. Build your quotation bank from it as you read.
Separation and love
The book turns again and again on couples coming apart or almost holding. Winter Swans is the clearest case: after two days of rain a silent couple walk by a lake, watch a pair of swans, and find their hands have ‘swum the distance’ to meet ‘like a pair of wings settling after flight’. Jonathan Edwards notes that the swans, so carefully described, ‘become… a metaphor for the lovers’: the birds that mate for life model a reconciliation the couple reach through touch, not speech. Keyways takes the opposite turn, a break caught in the image of cutting new keys ‘just when we’re changing all the locks’, asking ‘when did the bolt slip?’. Night Windows, Valentine, Marking Time, Show and Landmark circle intimacy and its aftermath; Landmark ends on the ground where two lovers lay as ‘A sarcophagus, shallow among the long stems’, love pressed into something like a grave. Four Movements in the Scale of Two gives the theme its aphorism: ‘bodies, like souls, / only exist when touched’. Thomas Church calls this Sheers’s subject exactly, ‘the permanent impact of impermanent moments’.
| Quotation | Method | Why it earns its place |
|---|---|---|
| ‘swum the distance’ (Winter Swans) | Water metaphor | Reconciliation reached through the body, after words fail. |
| ‘changing all the locks’ (Keyways) | Domestic conceit | An ordinary errand carries the whole end of a relationship. |
| ‘bodies, like souls, / only exist when touched’ (Four Movements) | Aphorism, simile | States the book’s belief that connection must be physical. |
| ‘A sarcophagus, shallow among the long stems’ (Landmark) | Metaphor, volta | Turns a lovers’ field into a tomb: love and loss in one image. |
Fathers, sons and inheritance
The most moving strand of the book. Farther puns on father and distance: the speaker climbs Skirrid with his ageing father and feels ‘the tipping in the scales of us, / the intersection of our ages’ as their roles begin to reverse. The hill is ‘split they say by a father’s grief / at the loss of his son’, folding the Christian story of God and Christ into a private one. Its companion, The Hill Fort (Y Gaer), revisits the same summit, but now the boy who once went ‘charging the hill’ is dead, and the father returns to ‘tip these ashes onto the tongue of the wind’. Sheers wrote a Welsh-titled and an English-titled version, so that the pair also stages a separation of languages. Inheritance, subtitled ‘after R. S. Thomas’, lists what each parent gives, then lets the two ‘become one’; Crown finds in its close ‘a sense almost of marvel at the beautiful simplicity of their lifelong union’. The Wake, On Going and Trees extend the family into grief and continuity, the last making planting a tree, John Hathaway writes, ‘a radical act of faith in the future’.
War, history and memory
Mametz Wood is the anthology’s war poem. A generation after the 1916 battle in which nearly four thousand Welshmen fell, a farmer’s plough keeps turning up the dead: ‘a chit of bone’, ‘the china plate of a shoulder blade’, the fact that ‘their boots outlasted them’. Carrie Etter observes that by keeping the soldiers anonymous and dwelling on ‘the relationship between the earth and their bones’ Sheers writes a quiet, universal memorial; by the end the dead are allowed to sing, ‘a sort of macabre choir’ who ‘can only speak now through the poet’. Flag turns to a nearer wound, national feeling as ‘a tourniquet, a bandage tight on the wound / staunching the dreams of what might have been’. History, Happy Accidents and Drinking with Hitler set private life against the twentieth century’s catastrophes; Happy Accidents, in the class’s reading, draws on the D-Day photographs of Robert Capa to think about war, chance and the losses art records.
Place, language and Welsh identity
The hill itself gets its poem in Skirrid Fawr, its ‘east-west flanks, one dark, one sunlit’, and closes on the ache at the centre of the book, ‘the unspoken words / of an unlearned tongue’. Coutts reads this as Sheers’s regret at being unable to speak Welsh, a separation from his own inheritance. Border Country sets a childhood on the England–Wales line where ‘life put on the brakes / and pitched you… through the windscreen of your youth’. Hedge School, its blackberries ‘tightly packed as a nervous heart’, answers Heaney’s own ‘Blackberry-Picking’ and turns rural learning towards a sudden violence. Late Spring, with its ‘lamb like a cello’, and Liable to Floods and Swallows keep the book close to the Welsh year and its weather.
People, work and elsewhere
Sheers is drawn to people caught in their work. The Steelworks watches laid-off men become weightlifters, ‘rolling a bicep up an arm then away’, looking for the purpose the closed mill took; the English & Media Centre notes how the poem, like the swans, makes ordinary movement almost heroic. The Farrier honours a shoer’s patient craft; Service follows a sommelier through a restaurant kitchen imagined as ‘the off-stage corridors of a theatre’; Joseph Jones, The Equation, Shadow Man, Stitch in Time and The Fishmonger build small portraits of lives and trades. A group of poems steps outside Wales altogether: Under the Superstition Mountains, set among the retirees of Sun City West in Arizona, L.A. Evening and Amazon look at ageing, distance and myth from far away, and find the book’s themes waiting there too.
Think it through
If separation is the book’s governing idea, notice how often Sheers reaches for touch, an object, a photograph, a pair of hands, to hold across it. Does the collection believe those things are enough? Test the claim on Winter Swans against The Hill Fort.
Towards the exam
Choose a Sheers poem that pairs well with a Heaney one, a father poem with ‘The Harvest Bow’, say, or Mametz Wood with ‘In Memoriam Francis Ledwidge’, and draft a paragraph holding both. The Comparing page has the bridges; the Quotations page has the critics.