Skirrid Hill (2005)
Detailed analysis of every key poem in Sheers' collection, with quotations, form analysis, themes, and comparisons to Heaney.
Collection Overview
Title Significance
- Skirrid Fawr = mountain near Abergavenny, South Wales
- Legend: mountain split at moment of Christ's crucifixion
- Symbolic: rupture, division, woundedness, fracture
- Metaphor: broken relationships, divided histories, fragmented identities
Major Themes
Detailed Poem Analyses
Discovery of bodies of Welsh soldiers killed at Battle of the Somme (1916), found by farmers decades later. Recovery of buried history.
Key Quotations & Analysis
“For years afterwards the farmers found them”
Gradual discovery; bodies emerge over time. Forgotten history resurfacing.
“the wasted young”
WWI’s devastating loss; ‘wasted’ = physically destroyed AND squandered.
“their skeletons paused mid dance-macabre”
Dance of death (medieval motif); bodies frozen in moment of death; grotesque ballet.
“broken bird’s egg of a skull”
Fragility; life destroyed; egg = potential/birth, now shattered.
“the china plate of a shoulder blade”
Domestic metaphor for body part; beauty/fragility; WHITE (china/bone).
“As if the notes they had sung / have only now, with this unearthing, / slipped from their absent tongues”
Bodies finally ‘speak’; silence broken. Their story finally told through poetry.
Form
Free verse; three stanzas, gradual revelation matches discovery process.
Themes
Context
Battle of Mametz Wood (July 1916, Somme): 38th (Welsh) Division suffered 4,000 casualties in five days. Bodies still found by farmers decades later.
Comparison with Heaney (AO4)
Both elegise war dead (Heaney: Ledwidge; Sheers: Mametz). Heaney more personal (one poet); Sheers collective (regiment).
Other Key Poems
Hedge School
Underground education and cultural resistance. Poetry as witness.
Show
Couple undressing; intimate but clinical. ‘Show me where it hurts.’
Trees
Resilience; standing despite storms. Yeats echo.
Late Spring
Seasonal rebirth; anticipation and threshold.
Swallows
Migration; home; continuity.
Y Gaer (The Hill Fort)
Ancient Welsh fort; layers of history persisting as absence.
Song
‘Your body is a country I have travelled’ — body as landscape.
Steelworks
Industrial Wales; manufacturing and Welsh identity.
Inheritance
‘You gave me the weight of your hands’ — inheritance of violence? labour?
Flag
Nationalism; identity markers. Symbol’s emptiness.