“Space is, of course, the “final frontier” but there are other areas for exploration, such as the deep ocean, and the human mind.“
Lonely Hearts
The most distant spacecraft in the solar system
is chatting online to the world’s loneliest orca,
a piece of string stretched taut from his tin can body
over 14 billion miles. Both are 45 years old
and should know better. But there is nothing better.
For ten years he has been in interstellar space
heading towards the realm of the ice giants
while she has swum alone in a concrete tank.
Voyager is heading blindly into the dark.
Scientists turned off his cameras years ago.
His ageing hardware struggled to manage
the waning power supply. Kiska knows how that feels.
Turbulence drums against the hull like gentle rain
then booms like a lightening burst in a thunderstorm.
His messages say, This is what I’m swimming in now.
This is what it is right now. And now. Now.
Kiska’s organs are failing slowly too.
She swims in circles, slams her body
against the perspex wall, or hangs, listless, listing,
dreaming of deep dives, waves, a thousand mile range,
while children call her name and drum on the glass.
She has had five calves herself. All died young.
Kiska knows what it is to be alone,
distant as Pluto, cold as Triton.
Kiska is the star to his wandering bark,
even to the edge of doom. Hold on, says Voyager.
Yes, says Kiska, yes, but for how long?
The imagery in ‘Lonely Hearts’ is wonderfully vivid but makes me feel quite lonely. How do you go about capturing a feeling in a poem?
Ah, if the poem makes you feel lonely then it has done its job! Of course, I’m signalling loneliness right from the start in the poem’s title, followed swiftly by the description of Kiska as the “world’s loneliest orca” who “swims alone”, and “knows what it is to be alone”, so I’d be disappointed if a reader didn’t pick up on that. Words like “distant” and “cold” reinforce this, as does the way the poem compares the smallness of the “tin-can” Voyager with the enormity of the ice giants Uranus and Neptune, the billions of miles the little spacecraft has travelled, and the length of time he’s been out there.
The conceit of speaking down a tin can telephone – two tin cans separated by a taut piece of string – in the way we did when we were kids, also adds to the sense of distance and lack of close contact between the two characters in the poem. With a tin can telephone, the further apart you are the weaker the vibrations become, so over 14 billion miles (if you make an imaginative leap and accept the metaphor) the actual amount of sound successfully transmitted would be tiny. Then there’s the comparison between Kiska, listless in her tank, and the children drumming on the glass trying to rouse her – she is solitary, isolated, remote, even when surrounded by people. All of these are attempts to add to the sense of loneliness. I hope the reader empathises with both characters: Voyager is ageing, he struggles, he heads “blindly” into the dark; Kiska is listless, dreaming of freedom and her dead calves. If a reader cares about the pair of them, the poem is more likely to evoke certain feelings.
I love how outer space is woven throughout the poem. It adds to the overall feeling of loneliness and maybe even the fear of the unknown. Do you think you could tell me a bit about why you chose to have such a strong focus on outer space in this poem?
I get obsessive over certain themes and this poem is one of three or four I wrote which were inspired by the Voyager interstellar probes which launched in 1977 and are still out there, beyond the outer boundary of the heliosphere, collecting and transmitting data to Earth. There’s something about outer space that seems to provoke interesting questions about the human race. Are we alone in this universe, are there other beings, other intelligences, out there, and what would communication with them be like? And how do we communicate with the beings we know best – each other? Space is, of course, the “final frontier” but there are other areas for exploration, such as the deep ocean, and the human mind. Voyager is travelling “out there” at speed but Kiska’s journey is inward. Taken from her appropriate place in the ocean, Kiska is rendered static. Her journey is psychological, into the darkness of her own mind. There’s a sort of balance in this which I found pleasing.
The word choice in this poem is absolutely beautiful. Are there any particular words that you find yourself always coming back to in your poetry?
Thank you. Well, the word “small” does seem to crop up a lot in my work, though not in this poem. But no, in the main I try to use precise vocabulary that is appropriate to the subject matter of the poem. I can get very excited about technical language or specialised terminology. In the poem ‘Berg’, for instance, in my first collection, Berg (Seren, 2009), I use “bergy bits”, “growlers”, “fracture mechanics”, “bed forms”, “ice tongue”, and “frazil ice”. The icebergs “calve” and have “tabular tops”. Each of these words feels like a little gift. And in my collection Red Devon (Seren, 2013), about my experiences running a 100 acre organic livestock farm in Devon, there’s a “slurry guzzler”, a “hog-oiler”, quantities of sheep dip and baler twine, and more than one winch and chain. Words like these seem to carry so much history, and have so many connotations, quite apart from the actual sound of the thing.
