Sheers - Border country Flashcards
Gist
About perceptions changing during the transition from childhood to adulthood. Sheers returns to a car quarry as a grown man contrasting his perception of it now with time spent there in his youth.
Themes Present
Identity Past/memory Time Nature/Landscape Death poetry/writing cyclical
Heaney Poems to compare
The Toome Road
- both remembering moment in childhood
- Sheers’ perceptions change as he grows but Heaney’s perceptions (strength of Irish connection etc) stays the same
- Sheers’ identity still rooted in nature but looking back things have changed; Heaney’s identity still rooted in Ireland etc but he still feels just as passionate?? ask L
Homecomings
- both about returning
- both use avian imagery
Direct context that can be weaved in
Mad Cow Disease 2001 in the UK caused economic crisis and a significant loss of trade for farmers.
Father’s suicide in poem reflects discontent in rural communities as depression was a concern among farmers in the 1990s and 2000s. Many farmer’s committed suicide during this period, abandoning inherited land they had owned for generations. (links to farmers’ loss of identity similar to Sheers’ childhood identity in poem?)
quarry and car manufacturing - links to decline in Welsh steel and mining industries in 1980s. (whole poem suggests idea of a decline/Ie. ageing perspective of Sheers, decline in economy, decline of father to suicide etc)
‘Border Country’ - Sheer’s childhood hometown, Abergavenny is 6 miles from the English/Welsh border
Lit crit
X
Metaphor
a headstone of trees, wind-written epitaphs
elephant’s graveyard of cars
a motorway pile-up
commas and apostrophes of minnows and bullheads
life put on the brakes
pitched you through the windscreen of your youth
Personification
dock-leaves and nettles running in their pistons
a tractor writing with its wheels
Sound of words
Alliteration/assonance
X
Figurative/symbolic language
raised earth like the hummock of a grave
young as the buzzards above us
like a rag shaken out in the wind
Types of imagery
natural
avian
images of death - throughout because even ‘buzzards’ are birds that feed on dead animals and carcasses
Word connotations
X
Etymology
X
Word play, patterns, clusters
semantic field of death - grave, headstone, epitaph, graveyard. Foreshadows literal death of father, death of childhood innocence, death of identity?
Juxtaposition, oxymoron, contrasts
x
Paradox
x
