Interview by Zoë Brigley
“I think writing poems has become a kind of counterweight for me, a joyful and organic writing experience that just happens sometimes”
The Glove of Cymru
Wales is covered in gloves, green gloves—occasionally brown —that fit her perfectly. Now that I look at Wales more closely I realise that she might be wearing only one glove. Its firm, fresh consistency coats even the tiniest angle and highest elevation. The glove is juicy. It regenerates itself. The glove of Wales is too large for the human eye to behold all at once. Which makes sense if you bear in mind that it covers every fragment of its mistress. Its movements are also not visible to the eye, because the earth breathes so slowly that we witness sometimes not one sinking of her chest in one lifetime. The movements of the glove of Wales, then, do not usually occur in human timing, but when the glove changes its colour slightly—which it can— the eye almost testifies. Sometimes I wake from my own regenerative sleep and find it so. For G.
This poem for some reason reminded me of a story I read about Tom Hanks, the actor, and how he started posting photographs of things that people had lost. He described it as a kind of visual haiku, and gloves were a particular obsession. Were lost gloves the inspiration for this poem?
The initial inspiration for this poem were actually some hilly fields in Ceredigion. I had one of those experiences, on a walk, when you feel like you see something, that you’ve seen many times, in proper detail for the first time. You become aware of small features that you never took note of before. In this case I was walking up a road, along some hilly fields. All of a sudden I found myself noticing many individual shapes, the ups and downs of the hills, and saw how the short grass and other plant life seemingly envelop every bit of the earth. Almost nothing is left uncovered. At the same time, the colour, texture, and length of the grass and plants seem to emphasise the shape of every little indentation and bump in the hills. I tried to describe this to the person who was with me on the walk and ended up comparing what I saw to a hand wearing a glove. A hand wearing a glove—like the hills I was just describing—is covered completely, you don’t actually see the hand. At the same time the elaborate skeletal shape of the hand isn’t usually disguised by a glove, you can see the bone structure of the hand in detail. That’s where the initial idea of Wales or the Welsh landscape as a hand wearing a glove came from. I didn’t think about it any more at the time. Then a few days later I was on a train to Birmingham New Street. I was looking at the landscape and fields again, somewhere just behind Borth, when the idea came back to me and the poem popped up. I always write them in one go and in real-time, by which I mean roughly at the same speed as normal speech. I don’t really make changes afterwards. I have a background studying philosophy and an interest in logic. That involves grinding through problems again and again and again. I think writing poems has become a kind of counterweight for me, a joyful and organic writing experience that just happens sometimes.
I haven’t really associated the poem with lost gloves until now, but I really like the idea. Somebody else who read the poem recently said it made him think of foxgloves, another idea I like.
You are not the first writer to compare a country to a woman. I wonder what dynamic you were intending with this here?
When I wrote the first sentence I referred to Wales as “she” because the word Cymru is grammatically feminine. I’m not from Wales and don’t speak Welsh, but I’m frequently surrounded by people who do, so I’ve picked up a few Welsh words and phrases. I get the impression that inventing a sex or gender for sexless or genderless things happens easily in languages that have grammatical gender. It starts with natural speech. If we want to say that the sun is shining in German, we have to say that “she shines” (sie scheint). It would be ungrammatical to say that “it shines”. If we now — still in German — anthropomorphise the sun in a poetic context, if we imagine, say, that the sun dreams or is lonely or something like that, then it can happen quite naturally that we start thinking of that dreaming or lonely sun-person (grammatically she) as a woman. I think when I wrote The Glove of Cymru something similar happened. I initially referred to Wales as “she” because the word Cymru is grammatically feminine and then this idea of the land as a female person started to unfold.
I enjoy your use of enjambment here. Could you talk about that?
I think I generally use enjambment to contribute to the sense of rhythm of a poem, to create little interruptions, sometimes even with a surprise waiting after the line break. Lines eight to nine of this poem are maybe an example of a surprise: “The Glove is / juicy”. Writing something, a poem or a story or anything really, to me feels like transcribing what I hear inside my head onto the page. So how to convey tonal changes and potential different voices? Enjambment can contribute to capturing those tonal
changes a little. For example, when I hear The Glove of Cymru inside my head, there’s a slight change in tone between lines four and five, “… I realise / that she might be wearing…”, hence that line break.
