Owen’s first novel, Resistance (Faber, 2008) won a 2008 Hospital Club Creative Award and was short-listed for the Writers Guild Best Book Award. Resistance is translated into ten languages. Owen’s collaboration with composer Rachel Portman, The Water Diviner’s Tale, an oratorio for children, was premiered at the Royal Albert Hall for the BBC Proms 2007. Owen was a 2007 Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library. He recently wrote and presented the BBC 4 TV series A Poet's Guide to Britain and wrote the introduction and selected the poems for the accompanying anthology (Penguin 2009). His novella White Raven's (Seren, 2009), published as part of Seren's 'New Stories from the Mabinogion' series, is a contemporary response to the myth of 'Branwen Daughter of Llyr'. Owen has recently co-written the screenplay for the film of Resistance which is due to begin production in late 2010. He currently lives in London.
Stammerer on Scree
This slope is my language.
A shifting skin of stone
that slips under my grip,
feet pedalling the one moving spot,
sharded slate, flowing hard water.
But when I am still,
crabbed against its steepness,
cheek to its side, a child on it’s mother,
then it stops.
Stone-ticks out to quiet,
rests itself on the mountain,
meaning everything.
Until I move again,
when it spreads under my hand,
slides from under my climbing feet,
like words from under a memory,
vowels from under a tongue.
The Blue Book © Owen Sheers , 2000
Harvest
Sitting beneath the horse chesnut tree
we were surprised by a fall of conkers.
Miniature mines, through fathoms of leaves,
pelting our backs and our shoulders.
You began to gather them in,
squeezing out their secrets,
and those you picked you kept,
holding them tight to your stomach,
as if you had been stabbed, and were
bleeding conkers from the wound.
When they became too many
you trusted me with some, which I held,
a bunch of knuckles in my fist.
But my sweat dulled their sheen,
turned them, dark liver brown to faded bay,
and when I gave them back to you,
you said it would always be this way;
because I am a man, and I have acid hands.
The Blue Book © Owen Sheers , 2000
The Blue Book
“Blue Books, The (3 vols., 1847). Reports published by the Government on the state of education in Wales
Lingen, Symons and Johnson,
Their names give them away,
holding thumb-cornered text books,
not a word of Welsh between them.
Page or man.
They found their God spoken in words
that ran unnaturally in their ears,
and they wrote their decree.
Rather silence than these corrupt tongues,
the words of the father shall not be passed on to the sons.
*
Because this is how an empire is claimed
not just with stakes in stolen land,
but with words grown over palates,
with strength of tongue as well as strength of hand.
*
And now another blue book
this, my brother’s school book
(bill – postered with bands, but blue beneath)
and inside, the Welsh in his and his teacher’s hand.
It has fallen open on a half written page,
the space beneath his work shot across with red pen:
“Pam nad yw hyn wedi ei orffen?”
“Why is this not finished?”
Well, maybe it is now, if not in me, then in him,
my brother, ten years younger,
but a hundred and fifty years and one tongue apart.
The Blue Book © Owen Sheers , 2000
Not yet My Mother
Yesterday I found a photo
of you at seventeen,
holding a horse and smiling,
not yet my mother.
The tight riding hat hid your hair,
and your legs were still the long shins of a boy’s.
You held the horse by the halter,
your hand a fist under its huge jaw.
The blown trees were still in the background
and the sky was grained by the old film stock,
but what caught me was your face,
which was mine.
And I thought, just for a second, that you were me.
But then I saw the woman’s jacket,
nipped at the waist, the ballooned jodhpurs,
and of course the date, scratched in the corner.
All of which told me again,
that this was you at seventeen, holding a horse
and smiling, not yet my mother,
although I was clearly already your child.
The Blue Book © Owen Sheers , 2000
My Grandfather’s Garden
Where bloodshot apples peered from the grass
and seed packets taught me the paitence
of waiting through a season.
Where I cracked the seams of pods,
and fired out peas with a thumbnail
pushed along the down of the soft inside.
Where he kept order with hoe pods,
at the stems of lettuces, emerging like
overgrown moth-eaten flowers, colours drained.
Where I crouched on the shed’s corrugate roof,
touching ripe damsons, which fell into the lap
of my stretched T-shirt.
Where I have come now, a month after his death,
the house and garden following him out of my life,
to cut back brambles and pack away tools.
Where, entering the hollow socket of the shed,
I hear damsons tap the roof,
telling me there is no one to catch them.
The Blue Book © Owen Sheers , 2000
The Farrier
Blessing himself with his apron,
the leather black and tan of a rain-beaten bay,
he pinches a roll-up to his lips and waits
for the mare to be led from the field to the yard,
the smoke slow-turning from his mouth
and the wind twisting his sideburns in its fingers.
She smells him as he passes, woodbine, metal and hoof,
careful not to look her in the eye as he runs his hand
the length of her neck, checking for dust on a lintel.
Folding her back leg with one arm, he leans into her flank
like a man putting his shoulder to a knackered car,
catches the hoof between his knees
as if it’s always just fallen from a table,
cups her fetlock and bends,
a romantic lead dropping to the lips of his lover.
Then the close work begins; cutting moon-silver clippings,
excavating the arrow head of her frog,
filing at her sole and branding on a shoe
in an apparition of smoke,
three nails gritted between his teeth,
a seamstress pinning the dress of the bride.
Placing his tools in their beds,
he gives her a slap and watches her leave,
awkward in her new shoes, walking on strange ground.
The sound of his steel, biting at her heels.
Skirrid Hill © Owen Sheers, 2005
Valentine
The water torture of your heels
emptying before me down that Paris
evacuated as the channels of our hearts.
That will be one memory.
The swing of the tassels on your skirt
each step filling out the curve of your hip;
your wet lashes, the loss of everything we’d learnt.
That will be another.
Then later – holding each other on the hotel bed
like a pair of wrecked voyagers
who had thought themselves done for,
only to wake washed up on the shore
uncertain in their exhaustion
whether to laugh or weep.
That my valentine, will be the one I’ll keep.
Skirrid Hill © Owen Sheers, 2005
Farther
I don’t know if the day after Boxing Day has a name
but it was then we climbed the Skirrid again,
choosing the long way round,
through the wood, simplified by snow,
along the dry stone wall, its puzzle solved by moss,
and out of the trees into that cleft of earth
split they say by a father’s grief
at the loss of his son to man.
We stopped there at an altar of rock and rested,
watching the dog shrink over the hill before continuing ourselves,
finding the slope steeper than expected.
A blade of wind from the east
and the broken stone giving under our feet
with the sound of a crowd sighing.
Half way up and I turned to look at you,
your bent head the colour of the rocks,
your breath reaching me, short and sharp and solitary,
and again I felt the tipping in the scales of us,
the intersection of our ages.
The dog returns having caught nothing but his own tongue
and you are with me again, so together we climbed to the top
and shared the shock of a country unrolled before us,
the hedged fields breaking on the edge of Wales
Pulling a camera from my pocket I placed it on the trig point
and leant my cheek against the stone to find you in its frame,
before joining you and waiting for the shutter’s blink
that would tell me I had caught this:
the sky rubbed raw over the mountains,
us standing on the edge of the world, together against the view
and me reaching for some kind of purchase
or at least a shallow handhold in the thought
that with every step apart, I’m another step closer to you.
Skirrid Hill © Owen Sheers, 2005
Late Spring
It made me feel like a man
when I helped my grandfather
castrate the early lambs –
picking the hard orange O-rings
from the plastic bag
and stretching them across the made – to –purpose tool,
heavy and steel-hard in the sun,
while he turned one between his legs
to play it like a cello.
Spreading the pink unwooled skin at their groins
he’d coax them up into the sack,
one-handed, like a man milking,
two soaped beans into a delicate purse,
while gesturing with his other
for the tool, a pliers in reverse,
which I’d pass to him then stand and stare
as he let his clenched fist open
to crown them.
We did the tails too while we were there
so when I walked the field weeks later,
both could be counted;
the tails scattered like catkins among
the windfall of our morning’s work –
a strange harvest of the seeds we’d sown.
Skirrid Hill © Owen Sheers, 2005
Owen, I hope your poem Not Yet My Mother lives as long as the rivers run.
ReplyDeleteowen, yous is well fit, yous know what am saying
ReplyDeletetrue dat ☺☺ (;
ReplyDeleteOh god ^
ReplyDelete