Marches

by Grey Gowrie

(Third Day, Carcanet)

Imagine a wood

in Wales, virtually in England

a mile away as the crows who nest in it

fly. The wood is small and scruffy.

Sheep can get in; a cow from time to time

disrupts the undergrowth, the private life.

The wind makes the noise winds always make

in Wales

with one difference: it sounds like Ireland

when pulled from the west.

Laid up in London you weather yourself

against pain and pain's narrow horizon

by learning the wood by heart: from memory,

from articles on coppicing or fungi.

Imagine negotiating an overdraft

in a soft wind with rain, in late autumn,

to purchase a wood you are unlikely to wander.

Naturally the purchase is value-adding

as you live by the wood and mean to live

in the wood

forever, gifted to an environment.

But with memory's eye and almost dead centre

of the wood lies a pool, mud with water on it,

which hides like a lost coin the mind's secret:

to live, live, walking against a wind

in Wales, in the mind, that lets you live in Ireland.

The poet asks you to imagine a wood in Wales, for you might never have been there yourself. In talking to us he is also talking to himself, because although he first engages us with his description of the wood around which the poem centres, he then addresses himself as “you” (which is also us) throughout the poem.

The wood is described as “small and scruffy”, in other words it is unkempt and wild. Being not far from England (as the crow flies) it reminds the poet of Ireland. Grey Gowrie was born in Ireland and, I understand, called it home until he moved to the Welsh Marches.

The fencing around the wood - if there is any - must need repair, since sheep and the occasional cow come to visit. The wind blows through the wood sounding “like Ireland”, but the poet is laid up in London in pain and unable to experience the animals and elements at first hand.

This poem was one of those written in the period after the poet's heart transplant, so perhaps the pain he writes of is a remnant of the operation and part of his recovery process. He says he is learning the wood by heart, which is interesting, since his heart is actually now someone else's.

There are also the books of fungi and coppicing; we avidly read about what we wish to do if we are prevented from doing it, because we seek to associate ourselves with anything and everything that transports us to the place or the situation that is, for the moment, withheld from us by means or circumstance.

The poet weathers himself against pain, his fortitude being synonymous with the woodland weathering the elements. Pain's narrow horizon (for pain makes one very focused - on the pain - and usually excludes a wider vision) is an echo of the narrow horizon that is the little wood with its trees.

The pleasure of owning a piece of woodland; to preserve it from development or assault from the slashers and burners, and to add it to one's own home as an annex of sorts must be a joy. The desire to purchase the wood, however, necessitated an overdraft despite the fact that the poet is unlikely to wander through it in the foreseeable future.

When he says that he means to live in the wood for ever, it is perhaps not so much in a physical sense but through love and ownership of the wood. He is, he says, “gifted to an environment”; he is its ardent custodian.

While convalescing in London he remembers - with his mind's eye - the heart of the wood; the muddy pond that is “almost dead centre” of it, as if the pond is the eye of the wood.

It is hidden like a lost coin; “the mind's secret”, because co-ordinates of the treasure that is the pond are known only to the mind that writes the poem; the same mind that lives in the wood - or in the idea of the wood - and walks “against the wind/ in Wales” that is so like Ireland. Ireland and the Welsh Marches have become one, embodied in a small, scruffy wood that is loved like a homeland.

frieda.hughes@thetimes.co.uk