Stephen Knight was born in Swansea in 1960. He has published a novel, Mr Schnitzel, and four collections of poetry: Flowering Limbs, The Sandfields Baudelaire, Dream City Cinema, and, for younger readers, Sardines and Other Poems, and has been a regular contributor to the TLS of both poems and reviews. His work employs, with great fluency, a range of traditional forms and also ones of his own devising. Decay, decline and disappointment are frequent subjects: yet he also brings (as if despite himself) a surprisingly witty and celebratory note to those melancholy materials.

"Our Father", published in the TLS October 31, 1997, is an apparently simple yet highly mysterious poem. The narrator and his companion have returned to a coastal location at night, in search of a missing man, possibly their father, perhaps drowned. Why are they in night attire? What might we make of the sinister line "any of his bones I find / I keep"? Why is the narrator apparently keener on this search than his companion? How are they related? And what rattles in the thermos flask?

While the poem could be an elegy for Knights's father, the theological resonance of the title is suggestive, as is the number of stanzas (a biblical seven). Furthermore, the rhymed tercets fall into a pattern - from which the final three lines are missing: those that would end "-ask", "-aken", and "-ine". What might fill those lines? "Ask" or "task"? "Taken" or "forsaken"? "Mine" or "thine"? (Even more speculatively: might the beach, and those cliffs, recall Matthew Arnold's theologically troubled poem "Dover Beach", or perhaps the fossil deposits that have contributed, since Darwin, to "the Death of God"?) There can be no certain answer, and what one is left with, through both the form and the content of the poem, is the haunting sense of a loss which cannot be soothed or solved by the narrator's desperate investigations.

The poem is dedicated to the Welsh poet and artist Alan Perry, who once taught Knight, and himself wrote a poem called "Our Father" which covers some similar (sandy) ground; the dark changes Knight has made to Perry's cheerful seaside piece further accentuate these mysteries.

Our Father

After Alan Perry

Let's look once more, now
that it's dark – you and me –
let's dig holes in the sand

then peer inside, let the sea
fill them up while we stand
and watch, dressed anyhow.

(. . . Your ancient negligée.
My dressing gown, trailing
in rock pools half the night.)

By now we could be scaling
slippery cliffs, our torchlight
sweeping round the bay.

Keep warm inside the car –
but any of his bones I find
I keep. Try my coat for size,

or if you have to sit behind
the steering wheel, itemise
the things we have so far.

His car-rug, stiff with brine.
Our tartan Thermos flask
that rattles if it's shaken.

STEPHEN KNIGHT (1997)

To read last week's Poem of the Week, "To the High Court of Parliament: November 1994", click here

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