Skirrid Hill

Skirrid Hill - Owen Sheers (2005) Analysis

Skirrid Hill is one of the AS level poetry anthologies here in the UK for the exam board AQA. Skirrid, meaning divorce or separation, mirrors many of the themes of the collection: fragmented relationships, movement from childhood to adulthood, man vs nature...  he tries to make sense of these threads through exploration of language and the natural world. 

More Information on Owen Sheers and Skirrid Hill 

To read his winning entry for the Vogue Talent Contest follow this link.
Sheers uses Wales, not only as a reference point, but in Welsh language (again showing separation of a country by language).

Analysis of all of his poems are available on the blog Silkwormsink. If you're looking for poem by poem analysis use Silkworms and some of the obscure references are made sense of there. 

My favourite poems of the collection are Y Gaer, The Hill Fort, Night Windows, Hedge School, Farther, Amazon, LA Evening and Skirrid Fawr. 

Skirrid Hill Setting 

Skirrid Hill, a hill in Wales, his homeland, is his muse and his guidance throughout the anthology. Ysgyryd Fawr, in Welsh, means skirrid or shattered which is in description of the hill's shape. Along with being an area of prominent natural beauty from which Sheers gains inspiration, the hill is also steeped in centuries of spiritual mythology. Legend has it that part of the mountain was broken off the moment christ was crucified mirrored in Sheers' poem "Farther" which evokes the skirrid "split by a father's greif/ at the loss of his son to man" which draws parallels, not only to the legend, but to his own life. There is local myth that the earth scattered from the Skirrid was holy and fertile and was taken away and spread over faming land, the foundations of churches and coffins "Just like the farmers who once came to scoop/ handfuls of soil from her holy scar". Much of the significance of the Skirrid for Sheers is linked to grief, death and separation. On the top of Skirrid lies the remains of a fort and a medieval catholic chapel that was built in homage to the religious significance of the hill - this is explored in "Y Gaer" and "The Hill Fort", "stone pile marking the centre" and "he knows these walls,// sunk however low". Both poems are both linked with grief and frustration with nature - which encapsulates the skirrid itself and all its mythical significance, as people for centuries have linked its slopes with the need for answers and reassurance through religion spirituality "I am still drawn to her back for the answers/ to every question I have never known". It was also, rather discerningly, a favourite walk of Nazi leader Rudolf Hess when he was imprisoned up the road during the second World War. Sheers' preoccupation with war and death, seen more explicitly in his newest poetry collection "pink mist", could be seen as a tenuous nod towards this event - a man of significant war crimes that looked to Skirrid Hill for comfort and spirituality just like everyone else, a topic seen sneaking into Sheers' work in "Drinking with Hitler", "Mametz Wood" and "Liable to floods" where nature is often seen as the biggest battle of man. 

TS Eliot East Coker Connections 

He begins his anthology with a reference to T.S. Eliot's poem East Coker.
"As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living"

Owen Sheers' collection draws upon many issues and parallels with Eliot's East Coker such as language, nature and its never ending cycle of destruction and renewal, ageing and death. 

Referenceing one of the greatest poets of the 20th century, Sheers remarks upon his own longing for recognition and success with his poetry that he often feels he has not met. Self dissatifaction and scrutiny, and quality of performance is something that haunts a lot of Sheers' work as well as T.S Eliot's who was renowned for being excruciatingly self critical. As a publisher at renowned publishing house Faber and Faber and responsible for publishing the work of some of the best renowned poets of the century (WH Auden and Ted Hughes to name a few) it's understandable how Eliot's constant comparison of his own work to that of others became a suffocating burden "not very satisfactory/... worn out poetical fashion. This is also something Sheers felt in his own work as his previous collection to Skirrid Hill was not met with great literary reception and the consequent writers block or stage frieght Sheers feels as a result "gaps like missing teeth/ in the face of my speech" "countdown throuhg the page/ to the zero of the word/ failing to catch". Many poems in Sheers' collection remark upon the battle Sheers himself has with language and words " it's not matter that matter, or our thoughts and words, but the shadows they throw" "surprised with how language can do this" the words caught her" In the penultimate Quartet of East Coker, Eliot also explores the battle with language he faces "trying to use words, and every attempt/ Is a wholly new start" "one has only learnt to get the better of words". This preoccupation with language and words for both writers is encapsulated also in the battle for the welsh language Sheers is constantly aware of throughout his anthology, a language "the unspoken words of an unlearned tongue"

 East Coker beings with "In my beginning is my end" and ends with  "In my end is my beginning" which gives reference to Sheer's Last Act. Which, despite its title placing it at the end, appears as the first poem in the collection. This is relective of life and nature's constant cycle "Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires"which Eliot makes a key feature in East Coker.

Links

Poem	Themes	Quotations
Last Act	Performance Language	“”stuck record” “last act” “the parts we’ve played” “the drawing back of the curtain” “previous scenes stacked in the wings” “under the sporlight” “the actor, bowing as himself” “face of my speech” “silent mouthing O” “the the zero of the word”
Mametz Wood	Death/Illness Youth Birds Performance	“twenty men buried in one long grave” “the wasted youth” “broken bird’s egg” “nesting machine guns” “skeletons paused mid dance-macabre” “notes they had sung”
Show	Performance Women Birds	“We watch, spectators” “like a pianist to the piano” “”the spell, the artful hocus-pocus” “paint your lashes from fine to bold” “high-heeled curlews” “the featherless wings”
Night Windows	Divorce/Separation Nature /Landscape Communication Performance	“with a sigh you rose from me” “distant landscape” “your body slick and valleyed” “their morse codes” “the night windows opposite performed” “trailing the dress of your shadow”
Farther	Family Questions/Answers Nature/Landscape Divorce/Separation Heritage	“Father’s grief” “the loss of son to man” “its puzzle solved by moss”  “”me reaching for some kind of purchase” “cleft of the earth” “a country unrolled before us” “sky rubbed raw over the mountains” “climbed the Skirrid again” “split they say by a father’s grief” “The intersection of our ages” “you are with me again, so together”  “tipping in the scales of us” “together agains the view” “with every step apart I am another closer to you”
Hedge School	Youth Nature/Landscape	“The walk home from school got longer” “Another lesson perhaps” “picking of blackberries” “emerging from the hedge and tree tunnel”
Y Gaer and The Hill Fort	Nature/Landscape Questions/Answers Family Masculinity Heritage Seasons/Cycle	“The mossy gums” “”the land is three-sixty about you here” “against the wind’s shoulder”  “tracing the horizon”  “the tongue of the wind” “The answer to any question”  “finding at last, something huge enough to blame” “I think I understand why the man who lost his son” “I think I understand why the man who lost his son” “his young son” “he’d crouch so their eyes were level” “by the fathers and sons before them “take the rain’s beating, the hail’s pepper-shot” “sout into the storm” “Y Gaer (The Hill Fort)” as opposed to “The Hill Fort (Y Gaer)” his grip on his mother tounge? “by the fathers and sons before them” “Tretower, Raglan, Bredwardine”  “how in these generations “ sown yellow in Winter, its lights diminished come summer”
Flag	Heritage Youth	“our flag” “throwing fits on its pole” “”old country pulsing to be young” “red white and green” ”old country pulsing to be young”
Amazon	Death /Illness Women Divorce/separation Language	“the surgery” “just like the bump in the middle of the night that started all this in the first place” “”Maybe when she’s dressing, her fingers tucked under the wire of her bra””able to draw her bow further and deeper than other women” “cut from the brink” “she had to leave the surgery and walk in to her new world, so startingly the same” “quietly surprised by how language can do this” “how a certain order can carry so much chaos” “with its hard C of cruelty and soft c of uncertainty”
L.A Evening	Reflection Performance	“Scenes from every stage of her life” “She sits to the screening of her photographs” “ “Screening of her photographs” “Freeze frames, silent films” Actors wear the faces of her friends” “off screen voices” “Alone with the audience “the credits”
Skirrid Fawr	Language Heritage Nature/Landscape Divorce/Separation Women Questions/Answers	“the sentence of her slopes” “unspoken words” “unlearned tongue” “Unlearned tongue” “ adrift through wales” Her east-west flanks” “handfuls of soil” “the split view she reveals” “”The split view she reveals” “this edge of her cleft palate” “one dark, one sunlit” “her” “I am still drawn to her back for the answers” “to every question I have ever known”