Owen Sheers notes that the word ‘Skirrid’ is derived from a Welsh word meaning ‘divorce or separation’. Examine the view that the collection is dominated by the theme of separation. You should refer to at least 2 poems in your answer. PDF

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Owen Sheers notes that the word ‘Skirrid’ is derived from a Welsh word meaning ‘divorce or separation’.
Examine the view that the collection is dominated by the theme of separation. You should refer to at least 2 poems in your answer.

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Owen Sheers notes that the word ‘Skirrid’ is derived from a Welsh word meaning ‘divorce or separation’. Examine the view that the collection is dominated by the theme of separation. You should refer to at least 2 poems in your answer.

Actively influenced by his travels across, Fiji, Paris, Zimbabwe, etc, and his upbringing in South Wales, Owen Sheers creates a collection of evocative poems which explore the themes of monogamous love, separation, nature and the complicated pattern between the dead and living. Possessing a ‘reassuring internal coherence’, as noted by Sarah Crown, Sheers’ collection not only resonates his strong connection with Wales, but his passion for Welsh heritage and landscapes. Based around the 1916 battle of the Somme in France, ‘Mametz Wood’ is a commemorative poem in memory of those who died from the Welsh 37th division. Focusing on the separation of the dead and the living, the poem elicits strong, morbid imagery to portray the brutality of the attack, ‘the wasted young… blown broken bird’s egg of a skull’. The harrowing images of war are reinforced by the alliterative, ‘blown broken bird’s egg’, - metaphorically symbolising a human’s head, Sheers references the head as a fragile egg, ironically vulnerable to humans but even more susceptible to bullets and shrapnel. Although ‘Mametz Wood’ is not a poem that focuses on the separation of a relationship, it touches upon the divide between nature and humans. Buried below the earth, the people killed in the battle remain very much separated from nature but also highly consumed by it, only to be dug out ‘like a wound working a foreign body to the surface of the skin’. It is unclear here as to if Sheers is elucidating on the notion that whilst bodies are ‘foreign’ objects to the field, humans as a whole civilisation are ‘foreign’ to nature itself. However, it is prominent that where there is recognition of separation, or ‘Skirrid’, there is also a strange sense of unity, as if two things, meant to be separate, are combined as one when forced together by the brutality of humanity. Sheers creates, what he calls, ‘a dialogue between poetry and place’, which reveals his passionate interest in the topography of the Black Mountains, a group of hills which occupy an area of South Wales and cross the Welsh/English border into Herefordshire. As Romanticism poems, an intellectual movement in Europe in the 18th century, characterized by a heightened interest in nature, it can be suggested that Sheers has been influenced by romantic poets from across the centuries, such as William Blake and Lord Byron. In the mirroring poems of ‘Y Gaer’ and ‘The Hill Fort’, the two focus on the qualities of nature and its effect on the humans that interact with it. The poems demonstrate how human loss and love are enshrined in the landscape of Sheers’ poetry, and also how a natural place can not only unify people but also languages – Welsh and English. Although poems with subverted meanings, and physically opposite each other in the anthology, the titles, one in Welsh, the other in English, mirror one another. In ‘Y Gaer’, Sheers paints nature as something to be understood and feared rather than conquered. Through a variation of complex natural metaphors, ‘ring of gorse’, ‘mossy gums’, nature is personified and given human qualities. Although there is a physical separation between nature and humanity, Sheers unifies the two, subverting ‘bad weather’ into a ‘shoulder’ for a grieving father to lean against. With a link between human physicality and nature immediately established within the first two stanzas, and the sense that the ‘ring of gorse’ is trying to protect the man-made ‘fort’, an intrinsic link is made, unifying nature and humans, rather than separating them. In ‘The Hill Fort’, nature becomes a place for tender and happy memories, as a place for remembrance, almost what the ground in ‘Mametz Wood’ should have been, had the bodies not been hidden in mass burials. As

a place that the father and son shared, it is no wonder that after the tragic death of his offspring that the fort becomes a symbol of the life they once shared. ‘The tongue of the wind’, much like ‘the wind’s shoulder’ in ‘Y Gaer’, again comes to the aid, allowing the father to ‘tip these ashes’. The tactile language ‘tip’ reinforces the personification of the elements and also illuminates a sense of separation – the father and son are now apart physically, yet the son is now at peace, in the hands of the surrounding landscape that he so enjoyed as a child. ‘Y Gaer’ and ‘The Hill Fort’ together appear to question the division between nature and humanity, but also cross the border as to why there is such a separation. As shown in ‘Mametz Wood’, nature acts, not only as the resting place for many fallen men, but ultimately the reason why they can finally be honoured after years of being buried and forgotten. The ‘plough blades’ dig the skeletons out of the ground, but had nature not harnessed them in the soil, they may have remained hidden for decades to come. Sheers’ collection ultimately focuses on the separation between many elements – for example, the dead and the living, and nature and humanity itself. Although not obviously dominated by this theme, many of his poems contribute to the notion of separation or divorce, along with the many other complex subthemes such as time (a form of separation in itself), patterns, and paralinguistics as seen in ‘Swallows’....