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Hen Harrier Poems is an extraordinary book. At well over two hundred pages (with
little white space, often two pieces to a page) it's more hefty than many a Selected. The entire book focuses on hen harriers: the earliest piece is
dated 1950; the last, only a couple of years ago, so the writing spans more
than sixty years of bird-watching and note-keeping. (Even so, Hen Harrier
Poems represents only a small part of Colin
Simms's oeuvre: more than forty publications are listed in his 'Selected
Publications' at the beginning of the book, including his 2007 Gyrfalcon
Poems - also reviewed in Stride.)
But I'm puzzling over which readers to commend it to. Is it too much of a
'special interest' book for poets, with its focus on landscape, weather and a
bird? That makes no odds of course where the making of the poems themselves
is absorbing. There's a range of material here - from field notes as a page
or two of prose ('As I arrived the bird had flushed a party of sixteen golden
plover and was pursuing them in the manner expected more of a merlin; low fast zigzagging, using the ripples of the land to tack') to
notes which have been worked on and lineated, usually untitled but often
dated:
Feb 7th, 2005
'Ringtail'
hunting, Crossgill to Tynehead west side
in
intermittent sunshine from 7am. until 10
puts up
blackgame: 13, 4 and 11 toward Dorthgill,
Raven 4, go
away soon.
and on to pieces like 'Solway bivouac harrier', titled and presented as more
developed poems:
Parallelograms, rhombs of easy flight
repeated
beats under lozenges of cloud
stirring
stanzas summing reflecting light
Colin Simms's writing style is consistent over the years, but may be too full
for some readers' taste - of whom I'm one. The heavy alliteration he often
uses draws much attention to itself, taking my eye off the nest he's
approaching in 1974:
come upon her
blunt chisel face as in lace
fronds of the
place - eyes coals-bright
fringe of a
girl's frock or shawl, light behind
ferns,
flourished as wing-feathers on the wind
forever until
found, asphodel flowers a few feet
from her
ground, coil spring stiff on her mound
(page
133)
But that's on the page; what would be the effect of hearing it aloud? He
gives you memorable descriptions of a bird 'winnowing' the air, as well as
some less so: 'her pinions / swirlsquaresshimmerscale-skin liquid'. Local
people and their talk make a strong showing, especially in the north, and I
enjoy his use of local words. (I'd prefer fewer uses of the word 'dihedral'
and far fewer exclamation marks.)
How the text is organised isn't readily apparent. It has no chapters or
sections or headings to help you find your way around. Most of the pieces are
untitled. You move through notes and poems switching date and landscape and
country and mood. Answer the phone, then pick up the text to resume reading
and it's almost impossible to find the page you last read. Is there an
underlying grouping based on the birds' activities? I'd need to read it a
couple more times to be sure. 'Colin Simms isn't an easy poet' acknowledges
Ian Macmillan in his recommendation on the cover - though I don't think
there's anything intrinsically difficult about
the text itself. What Ian Macmillan may have had in mind is a sense of
unstructuredness which, combined with the sheer amount of material, makes the
text feel overwhelming: certainly it hasn't been edited with a reader's
experience in mind. (The obvious reply is that what we call nature does not
come in chapters.)
So do I commend it to readers wanting to know more about hen harriers? As it
happens, I was one such - delighted when I opened the packet and found this
book on my return from three days on a Scottish island where I'd seen my
first hen harrier display. Yet curiously, the book hasn't really told me much
more about the birds than I already knew. The first page of text (prose) did surprise me: Colin Simms mentions 'some...breeding cocks display
nowadays much less, or noticeably less conspicuously, than their forbears
used to' - an atypical comment, drawing as it does on all the years of his
observations, whereas almost all of the writing stays within the experience
of its moment. I shall test the book on some bird-watching friends (though
they may object to some remarks about 'twitchers'): will they enjoy reading
someone else's field notes over their shoulder? I imagine so.
Field notes in poetry? Colin Simms is clear (page 18) about the purpose of
the form he's using: 'I follow my friend Basil Bunting in believing, from
experience, that information is carried best by poetry, verse.' The readers
he has in mind are, I think, those interested in the bird - not poets reading
the book like I have done. He continues 'Bunting insisted on the ÒmusicÓ of
his work; that it should be heard. My work is
not poetry on his level but it is something else as new: a fresh genre of
natural-history verse-making dealing with experience of a single species...'
This is an idiosyncratic and inventive way of writing natural history. Using
verse as he does enables him to record his feeling and his own experience as
part of the natural history he's observing, present in the field. This may
enable 'armchair' naturalists to be drawn more deeply into his material.
Certainly his way of working gives him a unique perspective on his subject
and his lifetime's experience holds up admirably when it is at odds with
received opinion. His 'Postscript'(not the last piece - the work goes on)
explicitly addresses this. It's also one of the pieces which refuse to submit
when arm-wrestled into lines:
Bringing
together these pieces to some sort of assembly
in October
2008, I am sent a typical example of
present-day
media-opinion - the Daily Telegraph's - under
the
heading
'Britain's rarest bird of prey not recovering'
.../... I get tired of trying to point out that the
RSPB
information is partial (in both senses...) and their 'missing birds'
are
about...
©
Jane Routh 2015
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