Owen Sheers
How does Sheers use nature to probe life’s wounds?
In his collections Skirrid Hill, Owen Sheers sees nature as a support to the complexities of life, serving to comfort, explain, or simplify them as a cathartic force.
As noted in the epigraph of the collection, ‘skirrid’ derives from the Welsh word ‘ysgyrid’, meaning divorce or separation. This motif is seen in various poems that are concerned with personal separation or separation as a result of a transitional state, such as the passage from life to death.
In Y Gaer (the Hill Fort) and The Hill Fort (Y Gaer), Sheers presents nature as a form of comfort to the bereaved. These poems are two reflections on the same experience, inspired by a conversation with the poet’s family friend who had lost his 19-year-old son in a car accident. The two poems combined could be seen as a comprised elegy, which moves from expressed sorrow at the beginning towards consolation at the end. They mirror each other in poetic and narrative structure, as they both are written in the stanzaic form of tercets, and the first two-thirds of the narrative discuss the character’s experience whilst the last third explains the significance of it. However, they differ in that Y Gaer provides an outsider’s perspective of the grief expressed on the hill, whereas The Hill Fort provides the insiders perspective of the happiness associated with the hill.
In Y Gaer, Sheers portrays nature as a provider of a sense of comfort and protection through the image ‘a ring of gorse’. This natural barrier evokes the image of an encircled fort, thereby protecting the father from his grief. This concept of landscape as a powerful protector is enhanced in A Hill Fort, in which the walls of the bastion ‘still hold him in’, providing comfort to the character by defending him from his anguish. Sheers places great emphasis on the fort’s protective purpose in A Hill Fort. For example, he composes a tripartite list of previous battles to expose that it is a
In his collections Skirrid Hill, Owen Sheers sees nature as a support to the complexities of life, serving to comfort, explain, or simplify them as a cathartic force.
As noted in the epigraph of the collection, ‘skirrid’ derives from the Welsh word ‘ysgyrid’, meaning divorce or separation. This motif is seen in various poems that are concerned with personal separation or separation as a result of a transitional state, such as the passage from life to death.
In Y Gaer (the Hill Fort) and The Hill Fort (Y Gaer), Sheers presents nature as a form of comfort to the bereaved. These poems are two reflections on the same experience, inspired by a conversation with the poet’s family friend who had lost his 19-year-old son in a car accident. The two poems combined could be seen as a comprised elegy, which moves from expressed sorrow at the beginning towards consolation at the end. They mirror each other in poetic and narrative structure, as they both are written in the stanzaic form of tercets, and the first two-thirds of the narrative discuss the character’s experience whilst the last third explains the significance of it. However, they differ in that Y Gaer provides an outsider’s perspective of the grief expressed on the hill, whereas The Hill Fort provides the insiders perspective of the happiness associated with the hill.
In Y Gaer, Sheers portrays nature as a provider of a sense of comfort and protection through the image ‘a ring of gorse’. This natural barrier evokes the image of an encircled fort, thereby protecting the father from his grief. This concept of landscape as a powerful protector is enhanced in A Hill Fort, in which the walls of the bastion ‘still hold him in’, providing comfort to the character by defending him from his anguish. Sheers places great emphasis on the fort’s protective purpose in A Hill Fort. For example, he composes a tripartite list of previous battles to expose that it is a