Overview of the Collection (AQA A-Level English Literature A): Revision Notes

Overview of the Collection

Introduction to Skirrid Hill

Owen Sheers' second poetry collection, published in 2005 by Seren, takes its name from a distinctive geographical feature near Abergavenny in Wales. Skirrid Hill, also known by its Welsh name Skirrid Fawr, is a split-ridge hill that gives the collection its central unifying image. The Welsh word 'ysgyrid' translates as divorce or separation, and this concept of division runs through all 47 poems in the collection.

The collection is deeply rooted in Sheers' experiences growing up on the Welsh border. It weaves together three main strands: personal memories, the Welsh landscape, and questions of cultural identity. Through this blend, Sheers explores the universal themes of human fragility and endurance, using his specific Welsh context to reach broader truths about relationships, loss, and belonging.

Biography and contexts

Owen Sheers' background

Owen Sheers was born in Fiji in 1974 but moved to Abergavenny in Wales when he was nine years old. This relocation proved formative, as his schooling in the border region nurtured his interest in poetry amid the distinctive landscapes that would later feature prominently in his work.

As a poet working across two languages and cultures, Sheers navigates the complex terrain of English-language Welsh writing. The historical Blue Books of 1847 were reports that actively criticised Welsh culture and enforced English education in Wales. This historical context of linguistic suppression informs Sheers' approach to writing poetry that honours his Welsh heritage whilst using English.

Literary influences and approach

Sheers draws inspiration from several major poets:

• R.S. Thomas - Welsh poet known for exploring rural Welsh life and identity
• Seamus Heaney - Irish poet celebrated for connecting personal memory with landscape
• The Mabinogion - ancient Welsh mythology and storytelling tradition

Sheers' global experiences, including time in Fiji and New York, have shaped his perspective on border sensibilities. He functions as what might be called a 'gamekeeper of cultural memories', using poetry as a way to reveal and preserve the histories embedded in specific places. As a landscape poet, he demonstrates how physical locations carry stories that deserve recognition and remembrance.

Detailed themes

Relationships and partings

The fragility of human connections forms a central concern throughout the collection. Several poems explore how bonds between people ignite with intensity but ultimately fracture through death, emotional drift, or simple discord.

Key examples include:

• Valentine - examines romantic love with unflinching honesty
• Night Windows - explores desire and observation
• Keyways - considers access and exclusion in relationships
• Marking Time - reflects on the passage of time in relationships
• Winter Swans - depicts a couple's reconciliation through natural imagery
• The Wake - deals with loss and mourning

The collection also explores father-son relationships, particularly in 'Inheritance', which draws on R.S. Thomas' influence to transmit legacies of both tenderness and rupture across generations.

Memory

The Welsh concept of hiraeth - a deep longing or homesickness - drives much of the collection's engagement with memory. This isn't simple nostalgia, but rather a complex yearning for places, people, and times that may be irretrievably lost.

Sheers revisits various types of memory:

• Relationships remembered - explored in 'Song'
• Childhood experiences - particularly vivid in 'Hedge School'
• Historical memory - 'History' incorporates quarry echoes to suggest how landscape retains the past
• People encountered - 'Stitch in Time' considers individuals and their stories

The bilingual poem 'Y Gaer' (The Hill Fort) demonstrates how personal past interweaves with cultural history, showing memory operating at both individual and collective levels.

Landscape and nature

Welsh hills, particularly Skirrid Fawr and the Black Mountains, function as powerful symbols of resilience amid decay throughout the collection. The landscape isn't simply backdrop but actively participates in the poems' meanings.

Sheers frequently depicts bodies as 'valleyed' terrains, merging the human and natural through extended metaphor. This technique appears in several poems:

• Hedge School - advocates for immersing oneself in nature as antidote to modern disconnection
• Late Spring - features lambs in rural routines, grounding abstract ideas in agricultural reality
• The Singing Men - presents masculinity through rural, physical labour
• Mametz Wood - powerfully connects war's fragility to the soil that holds its secrets

The collection suggests that understanding landscape helps us understand ourselves, and that rural routines and natural cycles offer wisdom that contemporary life often overlooks.

Wales, borders and dualities

The collection's bilingual nature highlights linguistic divisions whilst also bridging them. Sheers includes Welsh words and place names that ground his poetry in specific cultural contexts, though he writes primarily in English.

This border existence generates productive tensions:

• Inclusion versus exclusion - who belongs and who doesn't
• Appearance versus reality - particularly explored in 'Flag', where the Welsh flag becomes a 'Chinese burn of red white and green'
• Local versus global - Sheers' experiences in Fiji echo against his Welsh identity

Untranslated Welsh names like Moel Siabod and Lleder Valley assert cultural specificity. They cannot be easily absorbed into English, maintaining their distinctiveness. This approach suggests that some aspects of identity resist translation or assimilation, preserving their unique character even within English-language poetry.

Detailed language and form

Poetic structure

Sheers predominantly employs free verse - poetry without regular rhyme schemes or metre. This reflects the fractured, irregular nature of his subject matter, particularly the breaking and parting that the split ridge represents.

However, structure isn't entirely absent:

• Lines and stanzas mimic fractures and separations
• Short lines often suggest partings or breaks
• Enjambment (running lines into each other) creates flowing terrain-like effects
• Sparse rhymes and assonance emerge where appropriate, as in the half-rhymes of 'Inheritance'

The varied line lengths and irregular stanzas subtly unite across the collection, creating a distinctive voice that sounds both conversational and carefully crafted.

Sound and rhythm

Sheers employs several sound techniques to enhance meaning:

Alliteration creates rhythmic emphasis:

• 's' sounds for stammers suggest hesitation and uncertainty
• 't/b' sounds for caresses imply tenderness through soft consonants
• Harsh vowels and consonants in 'History' mimic the sound of drilling

Similes and metaphors merge human and natural worlds:

• The Welsh flag becomes a 'Chinese burn of red white and green'
• Bodies are described as 'slick and valleyed'

These techniques ground abstract emotions in physical, sensory experience, making feelings tangible through natural imagery.

Language choices

The collection's language operates across several registers:

Welsh elements:

• Untranslated Welsh names (Moel Siabod, Lleder Valley) ground poems in specific places
• These choices evoke cultural layers that English cannot fully capture

Visual language:

• First-person narratives create intimacy
• Person and plural intensify feelings of connection or isolation
• Visual imagery often softens graphic scenes, as when bones are described as 'chit' or 'china plate' rather than with anatomical directness

Landscape influences syntax:

• Harsh vowels and consonants in poems like 'History' echo the landscape's ruggedness
• The geographical split in 'Skirrid Fawr' creates couplets that bisect the poem east-west, visually enacting the hill's division

This careful attention to sound, imagery, and visual presentation on the page creates poems that work through multiple senses simultaneously.

Structure and reception

Overall organisation

The collection pivots around two key poems that share parallel Welsh and English titles:

• 'Y Gaer' (The Hill Fort)
• 'The Hill Fort'

These twin poems shift the collection's focus from intimate Welsh and family concerns outward toward global perspectives. This structural choice reinforces the collection's concern with borders and dualities - the poems function as mirror images, translation and transformation.

The placement of these poems creates a turning point, suggesting that personal and local experiences connect to wider human concerns. What begins as specifically Welsh expands to become universal.

Critical reception

Sheers won the Somerset Maugham Award for Skirrid Hill, recognition of his mature lyricism and skilful fusion of local heritage with universal themes. The collection has been deemed particularly suitable for A-Level study because it successfully combines:

• Questions of identity and belonging
• Place and landscape as active forces
• Accessible yet sophisticated poetic techniques

The collection rewards close reading whilst remaining emotionally immediate and engaging for readers encountering it for the first time.

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