Skirrid Hill

Probably the most famous poem from this anthology, 'Border Country', speaks clearly to the reader about themes that are braided into virtually every poem. The speaker is standing on the edge of an old car quarry, revisiting his past to find a trajectory back to the place where, as a child, 'we tested our voices.../...Sat in the drivers' seats, going nowhere.' That sense of a time 'when we lost ourselves in the hours before dark' defines a range of poetic thought across many of these great, thought-provoking poems. Many of them celebrate loss as a means of self-discovery; sometimes the dark itself, as in the poem about his grandmother Jean refusing medical treatment, becomes the centre of its own reckoning about ends and beginnings, death and regenerated life.All the poems refer, in sometimes oblique and obscure ways, to ways in which we negotiate the artificialities and contrivances of our lives in order to find borders, death/life, East/West, country/city, that help to train our eyes on past landscapes and future possibilities at the same time. The turbulence of grief at a father's loss of his son is mirrored in 'the hail's pepper-shot / and shout into the storm' in 'Y Gaer' (The Hill Fort) and then turned, by a deft kaleidoscopic switch in the next poem, 'The Hill Fort' (Y Gaer), into a new articulation of sense as the father, moving on, starts to understand what landscapes can do: '...it isn't the number of steps / that will matter, / but the depth of their impression.' That, I think, is what Owen Sheers tries to achieve in these poems and also in his novel, 'I Saw A Man', watching the disturbed (and disturbing) equilibrium of human lives as they rock and rumble through their own crises and traumas. Sheers explores the fascinating paradoxes of intimacy and distance, their peculiar interfaces, most successfully in my favourite poem, 'Farther', where the speaker refers to 'hedged fields breaking on the edge of Wales'. He feels the 'tipping in the scales of us' in the relationship with his father, 'the intersection of our ages', and holds on to 'the thought / that with every step apart, I'm another closer to you.' Those ironies and paradoxes reflect Sheers' take on the complexity of the border world he sees.Arguably a touch misogynistic in tone, his forte is in the fluidity of feeling, the stop / start caesurae of broken and mended affairs. A 'reddening sky.../...could be the setting or the rising of a sun'. It's a fine place to sit, conjuring the magic of that dual perception, a place where, I imagine, we may find the poet himself by our side.

This is refreshingly good poetry; there is so much rubbish published these days. Sheers is a real poet.Hos poems deserve a very wide readership.

Appropriate A-level text, interesting, open-hearted, some ingenuity of expression

Okay, a few good poems in the collection.

kept the young teenager busy for a few days..

Lovely poemsSpeedy delivery A level lit book

Splendid

A level study