Poems

• Title: "divorce or seperation", fixity of place within the collection.

  Ysgyrid Fawr is a mountain near Sheer's house in Abergavenny which is said to have been shattered at the time of the crucifixion and is a site of pilgrimage on Michaelmas. 10 miles from the English border, the split perhaps representative of this.
• Last Act- Features

  • Verse libre (the last line is the only one that rhymes, a conclusion)
  • Yonic and circular motif (zero, spotlight, silent mouthing O)
  • Sibilance (relaxing away from the pretence- "scenes stacked")
  • Postmodernism: an honest confession/lack of seperation between art and artist
  • Enjambment is conversational and hyposyllabic lines convey fault/speechlessness
• Last Act: A03/4

  • "silent mouthing O" vs "O gape of complete despair" in Plath's "The moon and the yew tree". Plath conveys depression where Sheers conveys insecurity.
  • Intertextual reference to Shakespeare's "all the world's a stage and all the men and women merely players" (As you like it)
  • People with a stammer (Sheers references this in the Blue Book) count down to a word to say it.
  • Sheers acted in Hay Festival production "Not about heroes"
• "Don't be surprised it has taken so long/ to show you these:" (Last Act)

  • Decasyllabic and then hyposyllabic line to demonstrate insecurity
  • Emphatic imperative that begins in media res, a sudden confession
  • Male dominated indulgence of intimacy, Sheers' voice leads the way
• "the gaps like missing teeth/ in the face of my speech" (Last Act)

  • "gaps" as needing to be filled, insecure
  • "missing teeth"=flaws in his poetry
  • "face"=poetry as representing Sheers' identity
• "the silent mouthing O, /the stuck record of my tongue" (Last Act)

  • anaphora, as a stuttering device
  • gasp as sex or horror and the blurred line between the two
  • tongue as phallic /expressive
• "to the zero of the word/ failing to catch. Because/ isn't this always the last act?" (Last Act)

  • lack of value in language
  • "catch"=desperation for connection, construction of a poetic voice
  • The limiting nature of a three act structure to expression
  • Naturalistic use of caesura
• "The drawing back of the curtain/ to show the parts we've played." (Last Act)

  • Conscious deconstruction
  • Shift to a 3rd person collective
  • Theatre as authorial ventriloquism
  • "parts"=split identities
• "The previous scenes stacked in the wings/ and at the centre, under the spotlight," (Last Act)

  • memories and their influence on today, the past put away but not disregarded
  • spotlight as a framing device
• Last Act vs Streetcar

  • Performance vs reality (both exposed by the light)
  • Vulnerability
  • Struggles to express->resolution
  • Intimacy with strangers
  • Memory and its impact on the future
• East Coker epigraph (TS Eliot)

  • "as we grow older"= development, experience
  • TS Eliot: Nobel prize-winning Anglo-American poet, his background formed a "generative friction" (Miller 2001) like Sheers and Williams
  • TS Eliot was anti-rationalism
  • TS Eliot believed in social change post-war (post-industrial Wales and the Old South)
• East Coker and Streetcar

  • Stanley's brash rationalism vs TS Eliot's anti-rationalism
  • Post-modernism as destroying the preternatural
  • Blurred line between death and life
• Mametz Wood- Features

  • Written in tercets, which evoke the unwritten narrative of the Welsh triban
  • In media res= timeless
  • violent plosive sounds like gunshots
  • onomatopoeic "ch" sounds like gunshots
• Mametz Wood-A03/4

  • Mametz Wood=location of the Somme
  • 38th Welsh Division (including Sassoon, Griffith etc) sent into Somme and 4000 men didn't survive. Sheers did a 2014 national theatre collaboration called "Mametz" and visited for the 85th anniversary
  • Sheers considered joining the military
  • First World War mass graves
  • Danse Macabre: Gothic motif of the fate of levelling death
  • Welsh identity of singing in all-male choirs as a way of male emotion
• "For years afterwards the farmer found them-/ the wasted young, turning up under the plough blades/ as they tended the land back into itself." (Mametz wood)

  • "F" alliteration (lasting effect)
  • soft consonance shows the healing effect of ploughs in comparison to the plosive weapons, nursing nature of farmers connecting to nature whereas soldiers destroy life
  • "Turning up"- spontaneity, carelessly lost
  • Cyclical turning of land into itself (oppositional death and reconstruction)
  • Reconciling trauma of the land
• "A chit of bone, the china plate of a shoulder blade,/ the relic of finger, the blown/ and the broken bird's egg of a skull," (Mametz Wood)

  • "Ch" sound of destroying gunfire/ plosive "b"
  • "Chit" double meaning of a message soldiers would send home
  • Fragility, contrast that china is handled carefully but life is not
  • repeated "of" reinforces uniformity
  • "egg"=irony of new life and destroyed physiology
• "all mimicked now in flint, breaking blue in white/ across the field where they were told to walk, not run,/ towards the wood and its nesting machine guns." (Mametz wood)

  • "mimic" as ironic and cruel
  • the enjambment is their march to death
  • "nesting" provides a contrast to eggs in the fact that one is life and one is death
  • inevitability
• "And even now the earth stands sentinel,/ reaching back into itself for reminders of what happened/ like a wound working a foreign body to the surface of the skin." (Mametz wood)

  • Volta: shift in time to the continued presence today
  • "sentinel" earth is a guard that protects their memory
  • Reminders needed to keep memory alive
  • "foreign body"-welshmen can't find peace buried in France
  • What is repressed will return
  • Long, hypnotic vowels
• "This morning, twenty men buried in one long grave,/ a broken mosaic of bone linked arm in arm, / their skeletons paused mid dance-macabre" (Mametz wood)

  • Volta brings recency
  • Fraternity
  • the beauty of mosaics in art but the morbidity of bodies
  • fate
• "in boots that outlasted them,/ their socketed heads tilted back at an angle/ and their jaws, those that have them, dropped open." (Mametz Wood)

  • Boots in the trenches famous for rotting quickly
  • powerful climax of the men shouting to be heard
  • "dropped open"=passive, no choice over the matter even in death
• "As if the notes they had sung/ have only know, with this unearthing,/ slipped from their absent tongues." (Mametz wood)

  • Empowered by unearthing
  • Swan song motif= men can only express while dying
  • Died for England, now freed to give their perspective
• Mametz Wood/Streetcar links

  • Music to express displacement ("captive maid")
  • Danse Macabre/fate ("Blind leading the blind")
  • War and the fraternity created by it
  • Civil war vs Wales/England: warring internal identities
  • Confession
• The Farrier Features

  • Tercets (triban), and a single line at the end.
  • Caesura and enjambment mimic the pace of speech
• The Farrier A03/4

  • Sheers grew up on a small holding (common to keep horses)
  • Decline of crafts in Wales
  • The farrier as a defined social role for men, and the breakdown of roles and communities
  • Horseshoes as a good luck symbol
  • Sheers will write about defined modern roles later in "The Fishmonger"
• 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" (The Farrier)

  • Ritualistic, craftsmen as having a spiritual role
  • Apron as a priest's cassock
  • "beaten" bay demonstrates the harsh reality of nature
  • Roll-up= phallic power, indulgent, old-fashioned
• "the smoke slow-turning from his mouth, for the mare to be led from the field to the yard and the wind twisting his sideburns in its fingers." (The Farrier)

  • Sibilance denotes slow pull on cigarette with long assonance that shows his relaxed nature
  • Sexual relationship between him and personified nature
  • Sideburns as old-fashioned and typical of his trade
• "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 the lintels." (The Farrier)

  • Monosyllabic description of his scent, he is base
  • The farrier has to objectify and distance himself from the horse to conduct his work
  • Lintel as domestic
  • Scent as pervasive and erotic (link to Joseph Jones)
• "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" (The Farrier)

  • Mixes tenderness and forcefulness
  • Industrialised car imagery questions the longevity of this job
  • Women as broken/ cars commonly feminised, regarded as something to be used
• "as if it's just fallen from a table,cups her fetlock and bends,a romantic lead dropping to the lips of his lover" (The Farrier)

  • Instinctive ( suggestion that this craft is the lifeblood of Wales)
  • Manipulates her with romance
  • Drops down to her level- gender dynamics and emasculation
• "Then the close work begins: cutting moon-sliver clippings,excavating the arrow head of her frog,filing at the sole and branding on a shoe" (The Farrier)

  • The moon symbolises virginity in Welsh culture, he is eroding her purity
  • Volta away from the romance to the sudden cutting violence
  • Semantic field of destruction and creation: cutting, excavating, filing, branding
  • "Branding" lasting impact of patriarchy and sex on women
• "in an apparition of smoke,three nails gritted between his teeth,a seamstress pinning the dress of the bride." (The Farrier)

  • Gothic
  • The horse is pinned into the gender normative role of a bride
  • "Seamstress"= master of skill but the farrier is also emasculated in this role by his precision
• "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 Farrier)

  • tools= phallic
  • precision and love for the tools, not the horse
  • sexualises her as she leaves, he has achieved what he wanted
  • power of the gaze
  • impact of lost virginity- unsure
• "The sound of his steel, biting at her heels" The Farrier

  • Sibilance
  • animalistic predation
  • Synaesthesia of sound and taste
  • Rejection following sex
• the farrier vs streetcar

  • slapping a woman
  • the moon
  • women stained by sex
  • erotic image of blue collar workers
  • social ruin
• Inheritance features

  • Two septets, then a sestet, which acts as a binding stanza between the previous two
  • Three stanzas, like R.S. Thomas' "Gifts"
  • Septets is a blurring of the triban and the quatrain, which are welsh and english forms and reflect the union of his parents
  • Irregular rhymes between lines
  • Motifs of milling and metal = industrial
• Inheritance AO3/4

  • Cycles of causality= a Marxist concept whereby Sheers feels destined to embody his parents and fulfill the same destiny
  • R. S. Thomas' poem "Gifts" has a similar structure and layout, Thomas was a clergyman and Welsh poet
  • Stereotypes of women as emotional and men as rational
• "From my father a stammer like a stick in the spokes of my speech. A tired blink, a need to have my bones near the hill's bare stone. An affection for the order of maps and the chaos of bad weather." (Inheritance)

  • Sibilance in stammer, stick and speech, evoking stammering itself
  • Sensory language in speech and blink
  • "Stick in the spokes" link to interrupted cycles of causality
  • Bone/ stone rhyme represents blurring of nature
  • Sheers' father is a planning inspector
  • Bad weather= enjoys destruction, Schadenfreude
  • Maps= the masculine control of nature
• "From my mother a sensitivity to the pain in the pleasure. The eye's blue ore, quiet moments beside a wet horse drying in a rain-loud stable. A joiner's lathe turning fact into fable." (Inheritance)

  • Polysyllabic 2nd line- complexity
  • Ore= welsh mining
  • Coexistence with nature, Sheers loves horses
  • Fable= Mother is english teacher, studied english at Oxford, wrote book called "Resistance" in 2007
• "And from them both -a desire for what they forgedin their shared lives;Testing it under the years' hard hammer,red hot at its core,cooled dark at its sides." (Inheritance)

  • Forged= mining, difficult to create, unison
  • 3rd and 6th lines assonant
  • hard hammer= old-fashioned tradition
  • red hot core vs eye's blue core in previous stanza, they cancel eachother out
• Inheritance v Streetcar

  • Inherited legacy (good vs bad)
  • Fate
  • Imagination and storytelling
  • Clash of rationalism and fantasy
  • Gendered relationships
  • Passion