Rebecca Ferrier takes an owlish look at truth, doubt, and lies, and at how poems can act as windows into our past selves
“I first saw Pam Ayres on Opportunity Knocks,” my mother told me, quoting ‘Oh, I Wish I’d Looked After Me Teeth‘. Later, her own mother took her to a barn to watch Ayres perform. “There were only twenty people there. I was twelve.” She recalls the poet’s inviting accent and a long, old-fashioned dress. “I liked the rhythm in her words and the silliness,” a pause, “and the sadness,” another pause, “I suppose she would have a made a wonderful big sister.”
I imagine my mother as a child. Young, light-brown hair, sitting on a hay bale with straw poking into the backs of her knees. I can see her longing for connection, hearing the warmth in Ayres’ words and the realness. That’s Ayres’ bardic power: she extends a hand between speaker and listener, saying: Yes, come along with me.
Passed from daughter to daughter, I too have a fondness for Pam Ayres. Her accessibility, her poetry an invitation to meet joy or pain or life. And her truth. Her finely-cut words gleam in ‘Woodland Burial‘, a funeral classic, which begins: “Don’t lay me in some gloomy churchyard shaded by a wall”. It is ageless, ever poignant, even if the contemporary poetry scene has phased out rhyming schemes. Then again, who could do it as well as Ayres? Perhaps the others gave up, knowing they could not compete with the master.
When it comes to poetry, it has been the women in my life – ones who have looked out for me or guided me or taught me about myself – who have opened the literary doors I couldn’t open for myself. And etched upon each door was a question written in their hand, asked over and over: what’s true?
And next to that, another question: why does it matter?
***
I recently accompanied a friend on a falconry day. The instructor told us about owls and their simplicity. That those hand-reared by humans tend to think they are human themselves and become silly, foppish fools. Since I was young, I’d clung to a notion that owls were always – without question – mysterious and unfathomable birds. Satellite-faced and calling to the night, I believed them to be creatures wreathed in myth and monstrosity. Alas, I was misguided: here was a truth from an expert that I didn’t want to swallow.
In her essay Bird, Mary Oliver describes an owl’s shriek as “the sheer rollicking glory of the death-bringer”. Meeting three juvenile barn owls – one going through puberty and very obvious about it – was not as much as a let-down as it was an education. There was no “death bringer” here, only Lizzie, Scout and Bailey. Fluffy, beautiful jesters moulting their cream-and-brown feathers.
I wanted the owls to be alien and savage. Instead, they were over-curious and endearingly ridiculous. It was akin to a celebrity encounter where you realise that behind the practiced smiles and production, the glitter-swathed singer you’ve long admired is simply a person doing their job. Or a poet carving up a moment and elongating it as warm toffee on a tongue. After all, it’s a poem’s intention to make us believe it, for a second, to fall into that world where we question or belong or doubt, is it not?
***
I used to think I could hide in poems, the same way I can hide in fiction. The latter is smoke and mirrors, characters as props to conceal an inner self. When I wrote ‘The Dowry of Hera‘ I thought the loss within the poem could be disguised, only for it to be readily apparent to everyone but me.
Truth in poetry is a tricky beast. We create liminal spaces, imagined events, real consequences and speculation. A form conceals or reveals. A contrapuntal can give us multiple realities in one work, read in different directions, where we’re able to see different scenes and hone in on the one that resonates to us, regardless of what its maker intended.
I’ve been wrestling with honesty in my work. How much do I want to be true? Do I want my poem to lie to you? Or be brutal in its integrity? Both, I think.
I am in my early poetical years. I can feel my inexperience. I am nervous about penning this essay, about sharing too much or too little. I am both blessed and cursed with friends who are accomplished and dazzlingly brilliant poets. Through their work and insights, I can see how far I have to go in my own learning. And how ignorant I am in many ways. It’s exciting. The truth is, I am advanced enough in my fiction writing to understand how I need to develop my poetry. I can see the path ahead, its challenges and hidden dips and blind turns.
Making it onto the shortlist for the Alpine Fellowship Poetry Prize this year was exhilarating. And with it came the disbelief. I am new to this, my own voice untested and still finding its footing. Who am I to spin sonnets or elegies? In my doubts, I find myself coming back to that question: what’s true?
We are all capable of truth, freed or fenced by it.
Even if a stanza isn’t as polished at it could be, even if it feels simplistic in my notebook or there’s a hidden meaning that even seems hidden from me, I come back to that – to truth. Each poem is a vehicle for it, for a moment, an emotion, a reality conveyed to page, for you. Though I may be owlishly peculiar at times, I can make you think I’m a crow or an eagle or a sparrow, at least for a page or two. And I am telling you the truth and I am lying.
***
Doubt, then, is truth’s sister. For many who are late to poetry, who have crossed the age threshold as defined by award eligibility and what’s ‘young’, we find ourselves stumbling onwards, trying to fit into a scene dazzling with brighter, fresher things. By the time our pamphlets or collections are released, we’re eager to say – “This is old work! I’m better now!” or “I’ve moved on from this!” – while still trying to stand by our efforts, facing a mirror into a past truth that was true to us then, yet may not be now.
Slowly, I am learning to embrace what came before. The ugly poems, which helped me get to the prettier ones, which I’ll one day deem ugly too. We are hard on ourselves, aren’t we? Forever seeking improvement of self, of poetry – one and the same.
Last year, I was in a workshop run by Shivanee Ramlochan as part of the VERVE Poetry Festival, where she encouraged us to “remove the apology” from our work. I’d never considered it. I apologise for everything. Even my social media posts are humbled and filled with “unexpected” and “shocked” and “can’t quite believe!” statements as though to shield me, and you, too. Here, in what should be triumph, is an apology. In case things are not going well for you – dear you, a stranger or acquaintance or friend, as though I can care for everyone, everything, all the time. Remove a sting or barb or loss. It’s an extra emotional labour I am compelled to take on that feels quite gendered. In this latest Barbie-core wave of feminism, I can see the patriarchal tendrils in my mindscape: dark, constricting and anti-pink.
But, again, what’s true? I can only work on one person at one time (myself) and one thing at one time and one line at one time. And, through that, one poem at one time. While I’m still exploring, learning, playing with my craft, truth remains a loose tooth, inviting Ayres’ infectious lines back to me.
***
While researching for a sea-themed novel, I have sought names as a root of truth. In Roseanne Watt’s collection Moder Dy (Polygon, 2019), we meet poems in both Shetlandic and English, where half-forgotten beasts or cold shores are made different and hypnotic. Always there is truth and not always in the absolutes of life and death, but of living and labour and femininity, as shown in Watt’s poem ‘Kishie Wife’:
Kishie Wife
Ootadaeks
Though some say otherwise,
she was the first
who went to fetch the fire
from the hills. Of course she was.
No one else could bear
a load like that, slung over her back
like an infant; all its brilliant,
burning weight.
We track Watt’s “paths of air” (‘Arctic Tern Skull’) and are forced to face our own unready words “so dry they sift between / your teeth like sand” (‘Salt in the Blood’). There is power in saying what needs to be said, in claiming and reclaiming. It’s that which I’m looking for when I speak on truth: power. Or, rather, self-possession. A power over oneself and voice and direction. The ability to stand by a past work and not apologise for it, not brush it off as a weak mirror to an idea I could not yet form.
A past self isn’t a lie, even in her ignorance. She was only … growing, preparing for flight.
When I talk on truth, I am not advocating a re-packaging of trauma or desire for confessional works. Only an invitation. That I could sit on a hay bale, as my mother did, straw poking the backs of my knees, and be pulled somewhere by your voice. Truth isn’t perfect. And if you don’t need to be, then I don’t. And our poems don’t need to be either.
Let there be clumsy moments, odd phrasings we’ll cut later, repeated words that an editor will highlight and tell you, unapologetically, to change.
If owls mistake themselves for human, I think poets mistake themselves for the owls of our childhood imaginings, forgetting they are deeply weird creatures. Ones with cowboy-like walks and ugly chicks, who aren’t serenely flying through the air, eager to seize a finger-nail heart in a mouse or shrew or vole. Calling –
Twit-twoo? Twit-twoo? What’s-true? What’s-true?
Owls, when grouped, can be called a parliament or a stare or a congress or a hooting or a wisdom. I shall think on that at the next poetry reading I attend, finding which truth to ascribe to us all, collected and listening and each holding our truths, wild or quiet or tender.
