I made this page for queries about individual poems because I was getting so many questions. I kept my email replies and have reproduced some of them here; I've also moved some answers from the FAQS general page, which is now for general queries. I tend to add new bits at the top. It may also be worth looking in the Guestbook.
And first, a question from the Guestbook which also functions as a warning for spoilers, of which this page is full:
I notice that you often tell readers what message/image you intend to portray. Don't you think that doing so is very much like spoonfeeding? I find that if I can access someone else's intepretation of a poem, I'll more or less follow that intepretation and not develop my own. It sort of spoils the fun of figuring out what a poem means by yourself.
I don't tell them in the poems. I tell them on this site, because they ask. Generally they want to know because they've been asked to write an essay on what the poem "means". I think that's a fairly pointless exercise and am willing to help them get it over with and do something better with their time. Those, like you, who would rather figure it out for themselves should follow your example and not read those pages!
Actually I have never let an author's opinion of his work influence mine unduly. Dumas thinks, and often says, that his character Aramis is basically selfish and worldly. He's wrong.
Are the roads in "What if this road" and "The Old Road" real?
One is. Obviously, from the queries I've been getting, someone has spotted two titles with "road" in and thought: exam question, compare and contrast... silly, because they're quite unrelated. "What if this road", obviously, is a what-if poem extolling possibility over reality (ie one of my truth-fiction interface ones), while "The Old Road" is in Shetland; the road in question, which still runs alongside the modern one as a track, was built in the 1840s by unemployed men as a government work project; they were paid in oatmeal.
Can you explain the theme of "Frost Greyface" and the quote in the epigraph?
The quote from Nekrasov, first. He was a 19th-century Russian poet with a social conscience, sort of like a Russian Dickens. His Frost Rednose is a character from a Russian folk tale; he catches travellers out after dark and freezes them to death. In the poem he comes as a welcome release to a poor woman who has no real hope in life.
My poem was written during the Major government (ie it's another anti-Tory diatribe) and it particularly relates to what the government wasn't doing about homelessness and people living on the streets, which a lot of them were doing then, especially in London. This gets another mention in "Id's Hospit", the title poem of the collection that Frost Greyface comes from. Frost Greyface is a 20th-century version of the fairytale archetype but is also intended to resemble John Major. The bit about "does not come like a general" is another reference to Nekrasov's poem; Frost Rednose is a bluff, hearty type.
Why is the language in "Sometimes" not inclusive?
- It was written for a specific individual who happened to be male, so it refers to men - other men do this and that, so can you.
- In the English I use, "man" means both "male person" and "generic human being" depending on the context.
- Using "person" where normal speech says man or woman is, to my ear, poncy and not even decent prose, let alone poetry.
- I'm bolshie - if people, especially critics or educators, tell me I ought to use "inclusive language", that's enough reason not to.
Why the title "MSA"?
They were the initials of a real person; at the time, because of the political situation in her country, using her full name would have put her in danger.
Is the "I" in "MSA" male or female?
Male. I wrote it for a competition, in which the entries were anonymous; I wanted to see if the judges would assume it was by a man. They did. So much for gender showing through... it doesn't if you don't want it to!
What's the historical background to "MSA"?
It's set partly in 1987 (the left-hand justified bits) and partly in flashback to the early 70s. In 1987, the male narrator, who's pushing 40, is watching footage of the then-ongoing Iran-Iraq war on TV and recalling a time, about 18 years earlier, when he was a young man studying in Berlin (which was then still divided into East and West, hence "Ulbricht's fortress"). He knew a lot of young Iranians who were studying in the West. At the time the Shah ruled in Iran and many young people wanted him overthrown, as do the boys in the poem. (SAVAK was the Shah's feared secret police). He was overthrown, but what replaced him was not democracy but a theocracy of ayatollahs who were more intolerant, especially towards women, than the previous bunch. The narrator looks at the soldiers dying in the war, wondering if the boys he knew are among them, and wondering even more what has become of the girl (MSA) with whom he was briefly in love. It's about growing older and the loss of innocence, also how older people continually louse up the lives of young ones.
Who was... (insert name of any one of several historical characters)
All right, here are some. The woman in "She was nineteen" was a concentration camp guard called Dorothea Binz. Senesino and Farinelli were 18th-century Italian opera singers, castrati, making a living working for Handel in England. Roerek was exactly who he says he was in the poem, a minor Norwegian king. The snooker player in "Man getting hammered" was Jimmy White, the one in "Exhibition" is Dennis Taylor and the one in "147" was Kirk Stevens (Benson & Hedges Championship 1984). St Cuthbert lived on Lindisfarne island off the Northumbrian coast. The speaker of "Frankincense" is the parson of St Michael's church near Sedgemoor; the poem takes place after the battle of Sedgemoor. Kings Sigurd and Eystein were brothers who ruled jointly in Norway. The slave-girl in "Tree of Pearls" who briefly takes over a kingdom was real and her Arabic name is Shagaret-al-Dorr or something like it - I found her in a history of Cairo. Owen Beattie is a Canadian archaeologist who in 1984 exhumed from their graves in the Arctic three British sailors who had died there in 1846. Ice had encased their bodies and preserved them; when unfrozen they looked as if they were asleep.
Karl Schlechter was a chess player who got the nickname "the drawing master" because he had no killer instinct and when in a winning position would offer a draw rather than humiliate someone by beating them. He died in poverty around the end of the First World War; he is my ideal man. And you can find a biography of him at Sarah Cohen's chess site
Earth Studies: General
Earth Studies is set in the future. The earth has become uninhabitable and a remnant of humanity has escaped to colonise another planet, on which I've always imagined them living mostly indoors and fairly artificially. Christie, an elderly earth-survivor, is giving lessons about earth-culture to children who weren't born there. Some of the poems are these lessons, and they have titles like History 3, Religion 1, etc. Some are answers to students' questions, and they have the questions as titles - eg "Do you think we'll ever get to see earth, sir?" A few are Christie's random musings - eg "I think someone might write an elegy" and one is a poem Christie is supposed to have written himself.
Where did the idea for Earth Studies come from?
From the kind of environmental concerns that were just starting to be around at the time (early 80s) but especially from a film, Soylent Green, Edward G Robinson's last. It was set in a futuristic New York, all grey with not a blade of green, overpopulated and short of food. In the middle, the old man, played by Ed G, decides to end his life at the Euthanasia Center. They give him a pill and he drowses off to some classical music (which wouldn't be my choice; I'd ask for Willie Nelson), watching a film of earth as it was. It's all forests, oceans, snow-capped peaks and after the grey it's very beautiful. Then it hits you that though for the old man this is the past, for us it's the present, what earth is like now only we don't notice it. Like Joni Mitchell said, you don't know what you've got till it's gone.
Is the name Christie meant to recall Christ?
No, and I'm still wishing I hadn't used it. It was a working name, the name of a teacher I once knew who was irritable and cynical like the character I was creating. I was going to change it because I knew it would sound like a religious reference, but I left it a bit too long and couldn't make any other name feel right to me. Christie, in my mind, is a man embittered by the loss of the earth. He hides from emotion in cynicism, which is why in the final poem he has a hard time expressing passionate emotion and has to resort to constant repetition of one phrase, "look at it", like a mantra. In my mind he's probably an alcoholic and he's certainly an atheist. He thinks belief in an afterlife is very harmful, because it leads people to live for this imagined, non-existent future and ignore the present and the world they live in. But though he doesn't believe in the Bible he was brought up with it and quotes it all the time - eg in "Esau". Which, incidentally, is a crap poem; it's far too preachy and is one of the ones I'm least satisfied with. Christie shares with me a great love for Iceland and a tendency to idealise it as an unspoilt paradise. I had not long been there when I wrote the sequence and it's true about the air and water tasting different.
I had also recently read Mary Renault's The Persian Boy and you can see influences from that - the names of ancient Persian cities in "Elegy" and Christie's urging to his students in the last poem to experience things to the full while they can - "look at it". This comes partly from an incident in The Persian Boy where the hero, Bagoas, is temporarily very happy and knows it won't last. He resolves to concentrate and enjoy it fully while he can - "I will never forget to know that I am happy".
Can you say something about the form and spirit of "Religion 1"?
Religion 1 is rhymed and in a strict metre, because it's an imitation of 17th-century religious poems, eg George Herbert's. At least, it is up until the last verse when Christie's atheism subverts it by suggesting that its subject, Adam and Eve's expulsion from Eden, is all a fairy tale. This, however, doesn't make him think it valueless. He suggests that "history" doesn't teach us much either, to judge by the little notice we take of it. He uses the story of Adam and Eve as a parable to show how men have destroyed the environment they live in, often while trying to "improve" it. The "lord of the manor", in the original Eden story, would be God; for Christie, who doesn't believe in one, I suppose it is nature. Within the framework of the sequence from which this poem comes, earth has become uninhabitable because of what men have done to it and they've had to go elsewhere, expelled from the garden as Adam and Eve were. I think he's saying that even if the Eden story never happened, it expresses a truth of its own.
If Christie is an atheist, why in "Biology 1" does he say "my most generous masters?"
The lines you quote are Christie's expression of wonder at biodiversity, the sheer number of different species that evolved on earth. "My masters" doesn't imply belief in a god; it's a deliberately mangled memory of the title of a play, "A Mad World, My Masters", by, I think, the Elizabethan Thomas Dekker.
What exactly is Biology 2 about?
I'll assume you're studying it in school, also that you know it's part of a futuristic sequence in which human beings have wrecked the earth so much they have to move to another planet.
That being so, I think Biology 2 is actually fairly clear. It's about the loss of species and habitats, the death of what can never be replaced. But I'm not going to "explain" words like Leviathan and Sargasso: look them up!
What are you getting at in History 1?
The major influence on that poem was a book called "The Naked Ape" by Desmond Morris, who wrote about humans as another species of ape and pointed out how much in some ways we still are one. I recall at one point he was talking about the parallel between the way a child learns and the way a whole species does. Ape childhoods go on a long time, human ones even longer, precisely because there's so much to learn. Learning that you are something separate from your surroundings is one of the first things any living thing learns, humans who can't pick that up properly are what we term autistic. As an individual learns and progresses, so a species; they do literally come down from the trees and live on the plains (what the great apes did) but they also in the case of humans become more individual and less parts of a community. "Since they saw themselves naked" has hints of the garden of Eden; Adam and Eve only know they are naked when they eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge and become conscious of themselves in a new way.
What happens in History 2?
People invent farming, basically, and find they can plan ahead instead of waiting for things to happen to them. This really was a massive, species-changing development, because people didn't have to be nomads following a food supply any more; they could plant or herd food in one season, eat it in another and store it for future use. So they think they have control of their environment. But there's still that volcano smoking in the last line...
Help! What are all those references in Literature?
Mediaeval, mostly. A lot from a book called Mediaeval English Lyrics (ed. R T Davies) I was fond of at the time. Most are anonymous but "more joy than there be stitches in my shirt" is from a poem written in English by the French poet Charles d'Orleans. He was captured at Agincourt and spent many years as a prisoner of war in England, so his English got quite good. The other direct quote, "Wher beth they, bifore us weren?" (ie where are those people who lived before us?) is anonymous, from a meditation on mortality. "Lyarde is an olde horse" is a short poem which is allegedly about an old horse who can't work any more; I think it's also a satire on the way old people are treated. Jankin and Alisoun are lovers in a rather saucy poem, also anonymous (not Chaucer's characters of those names). The boy who had to milk the ducks is from a 15th-century piece, "I wold fain be a clerke", in the voice of a schoolboy who hates his teacher. He was late for school and gives as his excuse "I had to milk the ducks for my mother". You can guess how well that went down! They are all quite minor, inconsequential pieces that capture one brief moment in someone's life, which is why Christie likes and values them.
Could you say something about Religion 2?
That poem refers to the shift from matriarchy to patriarchy (see Robert Graves' The Greek Myths or Mary Renault's The King Must Die). In pre-patriarchal societies the king (or, later, his representative) was appointed at springtime (the "opening") and sacrificed at harvest time, to appease the gods, fructify the earth and ensure a good crop the next year. Those societies generally honoured an overall earth-mother goddess; the invasion of patriarchal societies (who worshipped sky-gods and scored militarily over the natives because they had horses) put an end to king-sacrifice though it left us with a lot of myths about the death of kings and the beginnings of the art of tragedy. It was a characteristic of sky-god believers that they also believed in some sort of afterlife; earth-mother religions tended to think you just went back to earth.
What's the theme of the Fanfic sequence and is the woman in it you?
The woman in the sequence is obsessed with a fictional character and through her belief in him he becomes in a sense "real" in her life. That whole sequence was about the boundary between truth and fiction and about how things and people can be "real" in other ways than having a physical existence. The woman in the poems is a composite character who has elements of a lot of people I know in fandom. I got into reading a lot of fan fiction a while ago, and she has some of me in her too.
What's "Pause: Rewind" about?
That poem is about how we'd all like to put our lives on rewind just to undo maybe one thing we got wrong. Like in Galaxy Quest, though I wrote the poem before that came out! I was watching an old episode of The Bill in which a policeman put a security film of a robbery on rewind and thinking how nice it'd be if you could really do that. Real-life references: Challenger was a spacecraft that exploded seconds after take-off, killing all aboard. The singer who jumped off the bridge is Richey of the Manics of course. The pink dress that gets dyed red, ie covered with blood, is the one Jackie Kennedy was wearing when her husband the President got shot. I was about 13 then and saw all the pictures on TV, it was sort of an icon for my generation. Jackie was like Diana only much more glamorous and intelligent. There are no Diana references in there; I wrote it before she died and I'd never descend to writing about her anyway. The reason for the form is probably that I'd been reading a lot of Mark Doty at the time, and for a while afterwards I could only write in 2 or 3-line unrhymed verses. I call the two-liners Doty couplets now.
In "The Chester Zoo Marmot Movement", is "I have a dream" consciously quoted from Martin Luther King?
Yup. And the phrase "there's no such thing as society" was uttered by the unspeakable Margaret Thatcher. There are a lot of political poems in Selected because they were written during the 80s when I seemed to be constantly angry about politics. I was a trade union branch secretary then, busily being the enemy within on picket lines, and a lot of poems I wrote did turn out political. I'm not very happy with most of them now because I don't find them subtle enough - if I write "message" poems now, I try to bury the message more. "Marmots" is one of the few I still have some time for. Thatcher turns up in "InterCity Lullaby" too; she's the witch.
I can see that "Because" is about power and control but when and where is it set?
You would need to know that "Because" comes from the 80s, before the white apartheid regime in South Africa gave place to the Mandela government. I am pretty sure it was written for an anti-apartheid anthology of poems. It was also at, or soon after, the time of the miners' strike in Britain and there are references to that too in the poem - eg the police controlling people's movements, not letting protestors travel on certain roads, etc. So yes, it is about control and power and how if you let governments abuse it a little they soon get worse.
Any reason for the complex rhyme pattern in "The time is now"?
Yes. That is a "carpe diem" poem in a long tradition of carpe diem poems in English and it is heavily influenced by 17th-century poets like Herbert who sometimes liked to use rhymed stanzas with a varying line length. There's a pattern of both end and internal half-rhymes through it - well, you'd get bored writing free verse all the time, wouldn't you? It is set in Cooper's Field in Cardiff, by the way.
What's the film referred to in "The Extra"?
I wish I knew for sure. It's a Marx Brothers film, and the man who appears both on deck and on the quayside, waving to himself, is their father. But I can't recall which film.
Who was Annie Christina?
My daughter's cat
In the poem for Johnny Cash, "Generosity", who's the "mate" whose voice has gone?
Kris Kristofferson. He's got some of it back now, but at the time, they were duetting on "The Highwayman" on some daytime TV show and he was scarcely audible. Cash kept his own volume down to about half of normal, which always impressed me as the act both of an artist and a gentleman.
Can you say something about the poem "Eva and the roofers" in your Selected Poems?
What's to say? It's just this woman sunbathing, as far as I recall. She's gently flirting with the roofers but neither party really means it. They're sort of imagining their lives different from how they are, fictionalising themselves if you like. But it isn't exactly profound or full of meaning; it was more an attempt to capture strong sunlight and the mood it induces as a painter might - someone like Monet or Seurat who likes to paint effects of light.
And here's three questions from Laura and her class:
1) In "Tree of Pearls" nobody in my class knew who Ralegh was, could you please help to explain this reference?
Sir Walter Ralegh (sometimes spelt Raleigh) was a soldier, sailor, poet and politician at the court of Elizabeth I. He was rich and a fancy dresser but he didn't like bright colours, preferred silver, black and white, and he did wear pearls a lot. Here's a picture of him with pearls in his hair, Nicholas Hilliard's famous miniature.
2) In your poem "Torturers" most people guessed that it was based around a regime, but did you have a particular regime in mind when you were writing this?
Argentina. The kidnaps happened under the military dictatorship of Galtieri, the return of the children under the civilian regime that followed it.
3) In "Sweet 18" how did you intend the poem to come across? My Teacher was undecided as to if it was of a sexual nature or a longing to be young again?
Oh, I think it's maternal... mostly. You wouldn't believe it now, but Stephen Hendry looked very sweet at 16. Long blond hair and all.
What is the poem "Sports Day" about? And why the italics?
A raid on Dieppe by the allied forces (that's us) in World War 2. It went wrong, partly because the Canadian troops had no experience of battle, partly because the beach was better defended than it was thought to be. The italics represent speech or thought processes. The poem was partly based on written recollections from a survivor, and the "sports day" phrase was his. "Fluffed lines" are ones an actor gets wrong, here being used as an image for the wrong information the soldiers were given by military intelligence about the beach; the point is that they were still seeing the whole thing as some sort of act or game.
Why did you write "Harbours" and "Sailors"?
"Harbours" and "Sailors" are companion pieces, both using sea imagery to talk about the way people live their lives. "Sailors" is about how people have dreams and ambitions they never act on; "Harbours" is about how they set out to do one thing in life but end up doing something else, often settling for less than they really wanted because it's too difficult or daunting to do otherwise. I don't know why I wrote them, but one thing that may have been in my mind is this. A favourite writer of mine is Herman Melville, who wrote a lot about the sea. He was a sailor as a young man and travelled the world, but then he came home and settled down to quite a dull life in an office job, writing in his spare time. When he died, they found glued to the inside of his desk a scrap of paper with the words "Keep true to the dreams of thy youth".
And on the sea theme, what about "Lost on voyage"?
The narrator of that poem is a man who sailed on Drake's round the world voyage. The names in the poem are all real, all people who died on the voyage, and in the ways he recounts. Doughty died because Drake had him executed when he objected to the secret, government-sanctioned purpose of the voyage,which was exploration and piracy but which wasn't revealed to the crew for some time. Looked at one way, Drake was protecting his government's interests and the safety of his ships and men, since Doughty was endangering the voyage by disputing his command; looked at differently, Doughty was executed on a false charge. The narrator was fairly obviously in Doughty's camp, but since he and the other survivors ended up rich (it is true about the ship being ballasted with silver on the way home), he's willing to live with the deaths the voyage caused. So it is about materialism, to some extent, though the voyage is also a massive achievement of adventure and discovery.
In what sense is "Toast" a poem about Wales and are the street names real?
The street names are real; they were just the ones where the brickies sunbathed at lunchtime. The abandoned auction house was real too, but now it's had a new lease of life as a Wetherspoons pub. In a way that's quite appropriate because the mood in Cardiff that summer was quite vibrant and optimistic. We'd just got a Welsh assembly parliament, we were getting a new stadium which was a landmark building, and 1999 was a hot summer too. The poem is very much about Cardiff specifically, rather than Wales as a whole; if it's about Wales at all it's the urban, modern side of Wales. Also of course it's about celebrating the physical beauty of young men, which in my opinion not enough poems do.
Why do you hate "Sometimes" so much?
I think most people read it wrong. When read carefully, it says sometimes things go right, but not that often, and usually only when people make some kind of effort in that direction. So it isn't blithely and unreasonably optimistic. But a lot of people read it that way, which means I didn't write it well enough - the writer can always make the readers see what he wants them to if he does the job right. Also I know, because language is my job, that I have written poems in which the use of language is simply a lot more interesting and imaginative than it is there. So it bugs me now and then that this is the only one a lot of people think I've ever written. Same as Jenny Joseph is fed up of "Warning", which is really quite slight in comparison with many of hers but again is the one she is known by. I'm not letting "Sometimes" be printed any more except for some charitable purposes and in particular I won't let it be used by exam boards, which should make some of you happy!
Can you say whether you are the grandmother in "The Beautiful Lie"?
No, I couldn't, because that's the whole point of the poem! You'll never know, because I am creating fiction. However, since I did say "it was so long ago", you could reasonably assume that I was not a grandmother at the time (and I certainly am not one in real life). But since it's fiction, you cannot assume the "I" of the poem, or the boy, or the grandmother, ever existed, though they may have done....