Olivia Cole reviews Skirrid Hill by Owen Sheers

The final poem of Skirrid Hill, Welsh poet Owen Sheer's second collection, could for a moment be one of the bruised, awkward poems, less of love than of tenderness, at which he excels: 'her east/west flanks, one dark, one sunlit,' 'so I am still drawn to her back for the answers/to every question that I have never known.' In fact, in a poem that tips a grateful hat to Heaney's evocation of Ulster, it's his homeland and not a lover, with whom he here lies in uneasy intimacy: 'Her weight, the unspoken words/of an unlearned tongue.' Instinct versus learning, queasy feeling versus certainties create both the great power and yet, also, the tensions on which this undeniably seductive second collection seems occasionally to falter.

Adept at probing wounds - grief, estrangement from person or place, the endings of lives and love affairs - Sheers's voice is such an intricate gauge (his language doesn't so much emote as become emotion) that the slightest of false notes jars. There is an occasional tendency to state too plainly what, in terms of feeling, has already been made expansively and indeed often enviably clear.

Also dubious is the great geographical stretch of the collection. Though there is no discernible narrative (lyrics could well be addressed to several different girlfriends), the love poems, strung throughout the collection, rest easily with writing about his homeland and his family. Where the centre threatens not to hold is in adding travelogues to this mix. When gathering from seemingly endless places, spaces and times (Wales, London, Paris, the East and West Coast, Zimbabwe) you wonder to what extent the collection marks a cohesive whole so much as poems written since his last. Though perhaps just a touch overlong, that's a worry surpassed. The dislocation that Sheers brings to incongruous locations, however sensual or human their evocation (take 'L. A. Evening' - 'It's at this time of day/when the rollerbladers pass her window... that she sits to the screening of her photographs.... Freeze frames, silent films in which/The actors wear the faces of her friends'), is so powerfully and omnipresently his theme - his reason, it seems, for writing - that you feel that the reader could be taken anywhere and yet still feel that the emotional territory has not altered.

The poem, 'The Wake', describes a final goodbye to his grandfather:

Later he shows me to the door
and as he stands in its frame to wave me away
we both know there has already been a passing,

one that has left a wake as that of a great ship
that disturbs the sea for miles either side
but leaves the water directly at its stern

This is the limbo in which Skirrid Hill is anchored; always, however solidly realised the moment (an embrace, a walk, a night in the graden), this elegaic sense of belatedness. The reach of 'The Singing Men', his poem about buskers, shows that Sheers has not only the impulse but the ability to make a seemingly impossible number of planets (Capa's lost films, the flirting of a Zimbabewan general, a bonfire night party shadowed by fear) hang together. The singing men 'had lives, in which, if they were lucky, they'd squeeze/a little music in, between the lovers, the kids, the wives.//But now, it's just the songs that are left/to keep them threaded to the earth,' are lines by which a reader feels not so much 'lucky' as blessed to be haunted.

At its best (which is the great part of this book), this verbally and emotionally very strongly rooted ‘unrootedness’ is a locale in which he is dextrous and moving. Often lacily delicate rhythms (the fishmonger who 'lifts it out, understanding as only he can,' /the foil disc of the silver eye, the weight of the blade,/the engine-stroke of his heart,'), an eye and ear for the surprising, and, what's more, as a love poet, the sense of the dramatic poses and voices permitted mean that it is territory that seems very far from being overworked.

Of poems that already cast their spell over the memory, there are some really very fine ones indeed - so many in fact, that examples could be picked almost at random. Amongst my favourites though were 'Marking Time' ('That mark upon your back is finally fading/in the way our memory will... that scar/two tattered flags flying from your spine's mast,'); the drunk with desire tilts of 'Show' ('the jewellery/early stars against the dusk of your skin,'); and 'Night Windows' like a Hopper painting in which his lover's shadow trails across the floor like a dress. In a perpetual now, the present seems to be looked at from outside of itself, captured, yet knowingly recollected by an 'I' who notices that the moment or the person, or even that 'I', is not here to stay.

Poetry this subtle sets its own standards. So it is that poems that contain as much unnervingly raw, coolly contemplated emotion put as well seem for me, if not ruined, then certainly lessened by an almost legalistic inclination to sum up. Take 'Farther', whose weak last line doesn't earn its place, or the intricate 'Keywards',

our combinations matched,
our tumblers aligned precisely to give and roll perfectly
into each other's empty spaces.

..one of us made a turn that failed to dock,
went nowhere, stuck half-way, leaving us
waiting the expected click, which never came.

It's a poem of sad strength, flinching at the physical prosaic acts of 'breaking up' that must trail after something intangible having 'broken', that loses its force in spelling out its already affecting conceit in a final explanation, 'Strange then, that we should do this now,/this cutting of keys, just when we're changing the locks.' It isn't so much that the line isn't as liltingly sad and true as what it follows just that, as a whole, the poem's force seems weakened by this extraneous explication. The great pairing of poems about a more final loss, Y Gaer (The Hill Fort) and The Hill Fort (Y Gaer) are a case in point; every time I would go for the startling, hollow free fall of the end of the first poem, in which a bereaved father throws himself into a stupidly hard feat, walking in the storm, leaning 'full tilt/against the wind's shoulder' shouting, 'finding at last, something huge enough to blame', over the pat proclamation that ends its companion poem, with a gaze at the stone walls that 'protect as much as they defend.'

In light of how much I liked not just parts, but the far greater part of Skirrid Hill, and how keen I will be to see the next examples of a mode that with The Blue Book and his prose memoir The Dust Diaries, Sheers has made distinctively his own, the criticisms perhaps cast too much of a long shadow here. His inclination to overstate could be a case for a smidgen of more judicious editing, or perhaps it's simply a matter of taste. What's clear is that to care so much for whether the odd poem swerves off kilter is itself testament to the poet's power. If 'unlearned' is the tag Sheers would choose for his poetry of feeling and senses, then it's workmanship of the most artisan, powerfully affecting kind.

Skirrid Hill, Seren, £7.99

The views expressed by contributors to the reviews section of Poetry Matters are not those of Tower Poetry, or of Christ Church, Oxford, and are solely those of the reviewers.