“When you start writing a poem you have to be prepared to walk boldly into failure.“
Content warning: mention of domestic abuse
The Farrier
Blessing himself with his apron, the leather black and tan of a rain-beaten bay, he pinches a roll-up to his lips and waits for the mare to be led from the field to the yard, the smoke slow-turning from his mouth and the wind twisting his sideburns in its fingers. She smells him as he passes, woodbine, metal and hoof, careful not to look her in the eye as he runs his hand the length of her neck, checking for dust on a lintel. Folding her back leg with one arm, he leans into her flank like a man putting his shoulder to a knackered car, catches the hoof between his knees as if it's always just fallen from a table, cups her fetlock and bends, a romantic lead dropping to the lips of his lover. Then the close work begins: cutting moon-sliver clippings, excavating the arrow head of her frog, filing at her sole and branding on a shoe in an apparition of smoke, three nails gritted between his teeth, a seamstress pinning the dress of the bride. Placing his tools in their beds, he gives her a slap and watches her leave, awkward in her new shoes, walking on strange ground. The sound of his steel, biting at her heels.
The detail in this poem is incredibly precisely observed. Tell us about your connection to horses and the countryside.
I’ve never shoed a horse, but I was brought up on a smallholding near Abergavenny and there were always horses and ponies around, so the farrier visiting was a very evocative memory for me.
This poem had a double genesis – there was that fertile childhood memory, but also a second, darker impetus. I wrote it in my 20s after my mother had phoned and mentioned that the farrier had been convicted of domestic violence. Suddenly, this very immediate piece of disturbing information was layered onto that deep well of childhood recollection. I was seeing the memory through a new, contemporary lens.
I’ve always been fascinated by the symbiotic relationship between humans and horses, but I tried to braid a tension between tenderness and violence through this poem. A lot of students immediately pick up on the undertone of sexual violence when they read it.
The act of burning and hammering a piece of metal onto another animal is, after all, a kind of act of violence in itself – and I’ve never forgotten the smoke, steam and smell of burnt hoof.
Now I’m living back in the countryside in Talgarth near a business that runs horseriding holidays so I’m often in the presence of horses again. My work can have a long gestation period, though. I’ve been back eight years and have only recently started to write poems drawn from the landscape of the Black Mountains.
For a long while, The Farrier was just a block of text, but you get to a point where you need to calibrate a draft – you want it to feel sprung – and I find moving it into tercets or even quatrains can help do that, as well as helping drive economy.
That word ‘economy’ is one you’ve used in connection with RS Thomas, saying how you learnt ‘the beauty of economy’ from him. Why was he an important influence, and which other ‘rural’ writers do you admire?
I can clearly remember how, when I was starting to write at 17 or 18, I always had too many words on the page, but was struck by RS Thomas’s gift for metaphor, for the way he could strike sometimes just a couple of words together and spark a third image, a third element. That was my introduction to an essential ingredient of poetry – how less can be more.
The real-life farrier was actually a man who was incredibly sparse of speech – so he could have almost been a character in a Thomas poem.
I studied Thomas for A level – in fact, I read everything by him. Given the era it was, I was also very aware of the twin turbines of poetry – Heaney and Hughes. So I was being fuelled in life and on the page by a strong sense of rurality. That rural landscape – and the proximity in it of life and death – was my early physical and literary environment.
The philosopher Thomas Hobbs was right when he said imagination and memory are one and the same. There is something about remembering an experience that can make it much more evocative. It’s often, therefore, when I’m out of an environment that I remember it most fully.
The Farrier, for example, was written when I was in London, very much away from that countryside environment. I can distinctly remember drafting it sitting on a bed in Hammersmith!
I tried to channel Thomas’s sense of brevity in the title. Given there’s a lot of hinterland and subterranean suggestion in the poem, I wanted a simple title – something that almost felt like a piece of metal plonked down at the top – analogous to the act of putting a shoe on a horse. In the sound world of that word, hopefully there is the sense of iron, too.
You had a spell as artist-in-residence for the Welsh rugby union team. How was that experience?
During the time I was there in 2012, every match-day programme had a new poem in it – so they instantly became my most widely read poems, with print runs of about 80,000!
I’d just finished a challenging project working with wounded service personnel, on subjects such as PTSD and recovery, but unexpectedly this turned out to have some parallels with that. I found myself surrounded by a group of young men who, like those service personnel, were living with this profound sense that, even though they were only in their early- or mid-20s, the apex of their life could be here and it all could end at any moment.
The experience also resulted in a prose book, Calon, which was an attempt to get under the skin of what it means to be a professional sportsman and everyone else who is close to the game on match-day. I love American literary sportswriting, but have always been aware we don’t have the same tradition of creative non-fiction when it comes to sport in Britain.
After a long spell exploring hybrid forms of verse drama or documentary poetry, I’ve returned to more ‘traditional’ poetry these days. It’s made me remember how important it is to trust my subconscious and instinct. If I’m aware of everything I’ve read, written and learnt whenever I sit down to write, I simply wouldn’t get anything down. I’d just be constantly stopping myself. When you start writing a poem you have to be prepared to walk boldly into failure.
I think I took that approach with The Farrier, but I was so young then and drawing on a memory from when I was even younger. Heaney said childhood memories are the poet’s treasure chest and he’s right, because the world’s volume and colour and contrast are all turned up when you’re that age.