Poetspeak: a self-reflection
by NIGEL HUMPHREYS
| Poem: | The Hawk's Mewl | |
| Published in: | The Hawk's Mewl (Arbor Vitae Press) |
My poetry is often sourced from a moment of intense lucidity. It typically lasts a second or two but its power to seduce is catatonic. I have to bottle it before it dilutes in the must of everything which succeeds it. In this sense my poetry is a cellar of vintages, each racked for tasting whenever . . . The eponymous poem of my collection The Hawk’s Mewl is one such claret, a good claret I hope.
My wife and I live sandwiched between the coast and the Cambrian mountains where woodland trails left by the foresters to aid their disposal of pines provide fine walks for the dog. Many of the pines around the lake Bwlchstyllen have been inexpertly peeled and felled by the wind so that they die in each other’s benuded branches. Skirting the lake under this threat of crippled pines on one particularly gloomy afternoon, cold wind and rain in our faces, clouds at speed, the walk becoming a penance for God knows what I began to hear above the mayhem the mewl of a hawk in an exalted position high above us and his cry not only seemed to mirror that dreich afternoon but something far deeper. It was more than a cry but an echo which had underpinned existence since reptiles first flew. That’s how I felt it. It had great depth and vision, the only living sound above the wind and creaking of branches. As I am explaining it here I am conscious of the limits of prose to do it justice. Only poetry has the freedom of expression to enable the reader to experience the dagger of the hawk’s mewl, as though it knew the future and was crying for the irredeemable.
Blinking into the rain I eventually tracked the cry to a bare pine tree on the top of a forested crest several hundred metres away – a faint cipher of despair but because the branches had long ago been ripped away it was clearly visible and immovable. To capture the essence of those resonant moments back at my desk I had to retrace my walk in my mind and listen over and over again to its lament jotting down randomly whatever it conjured. Why particular images surface in this way I can’t explain. One has to simply let the creative process take over, I find. In a way I inhabited the mewl, got inside its long plaintive semibreves, tried to see what the hawk saw, took the low temperature of its blood. In surrendering my will to this process of sublimation the images came: the sealed darkness, covert dimension, swaddled dead,the sudden death in lashed wastelands, the falling away, falling away and many others since discarded.
But a succession of images isn’t enough to sustain a poem. For me a poem has to be more than a moment trap, an album snapshot. It must be about something that matters, convey an idea that will straighten the reader’s back, jolt back his or her head. To this end I needed to ask myself what do all these images amount to: what is the bottom line, what is the hawk ultimately bewailing. To me they added up to one overwhelming resonance: that of futility as though the bird had seen into the future and found no purpose in it – ‘a dreary on and on’, to quote D.H. Lawrence, and that is what I hope I have expressed in the poem for what is the point of evolution for its own sake ? But there doesn’t have to be a point, I hear some say. I agree and to me, on that miserable afternoon in that godless terrain, that is what the hawk perhaps was lamenting.
The Hawk’s Mewl by Nigel Humphreys from his collection
of the same name published by Arbor Vitae Press.
See the poet’s website for details of how to obtain
a signed copy
from the poet himself or BM Spellbound, London.