Sinews — On Siobhan Hodge’s Justice for Romeo
Advocacy, elegy, and a deep respect for horses are the sinews
running through this book of poetry. And ‘love’ — by which I don’t mean the
false love that Siobhan Hodge notes in her preface as being extended to horses
as a kind of ‘well-meaning’ though mistaken fetishisation and objectification,
but rather as a genuine affection for the uniqueness and difference/s of
horses. This is no book of anthropomorphic projection, but of seeing and
hearing, of sharing life with horses. Though horse life is not contingent on
humans, there’s been a timeless interaction between horses and humans, sadly,
mainly with humans exploiting horses. In her remarkable work, Justice for Romeo, Siobhan Hodge considers
the complex nature of human-horse interactions, and especially her own
interactions with horses since childhood. It is not about objectification, but self-scrutiny
and self-searching as to how Siobhan has situated herself in these
interactions. In essence, these are dialogues of trust, of call and response,
of elation and disappointment, of miscommunications. And further, it is not a
romanticised version of human-horse relationships, but a complex and often
troubled one.
Through reflections on the distance
between depicting the horse in art and the ‘inspiration’ in quotidian
matter-of-factness, the utility of the horse in — say — the world of the
ancient Greeks, or of the 18th-century English painter of horses,
George Stubbs, there is an overwhelming sense of slippage in the poems between
the real lives of horses and how we use and see them. Some artists are
sensitive to it, giving horses different expressions for different moods;
others are so distracted by aesthetics that they move through the horror of
corpses, through the anatomies, with a ‘scientific eye’, and an eye to their
art. So, Siobhan’s
poem ‘Stubbs’ is a powerful challenge to placing aesthetics over life and marks
the distance between seeing and compassion. I admire the empathy of this book,
but also its hard-nosed critique of human abuse of horses, its confronting the
disturbances.
The use of horses for sport, or in
war, or as transport, and in so many other ways, leads to an expression of not
only guilt in this book, but a furious sense of advocacy. Nothing is whispered
in speaking back to other humans about the wrongs of exploitation. But there’s
also the respect and the out-and-out understanding that can be expressed by horse
and human. Siobhan is able to express this redemptive and enriching
spirituality in ways I have encountered in no other poetry.
Throughout the various short, swift,
and concise sections of the book, there is an intense physicality. Relationship
between rider and horse is necessarily physical, and often risky. There are
accidents in here — to rider and horse. They are lamented, critiqued, recorded.
But what comes of it is the equality between embodiments — the horse’s body and
the human body are deserving of equal respect, and equal marvel. If the rider
goes with the horse, and does not bully and cajole, there is the chance of communication
that is respectfully and non-invasively physical, as well, as yes, spiritual.
What I so respect about Hodge’s ‘spirituality’ as expressed in this work is
that it is universal, not constrained by a machine of belief. Hodge has a
purpose here — to translate the conditions under which horses, individually
and collectively, live when in contact with humans.
One of the most remarkable poems in
the collection is ‘Przewalski’s Pelts’ in which we consider — no, more than
consider... we engage with the fate of the Mongolian horse as ‘breed’, but also
as individuals, as bodies and souls. So under threat, with their ‘rebirth’ measured
in terms of a couple of remaining horses, they have strangely and somewhat
disturbingly thrived in the fallout zone around Chernobyl, which has been
designated a nature reserve only because it can’t be used for anything else. In
recent years, the herd had reached two hundred individuals, but poachers have
much diminished the herd. This entry into the fallout zone to profit, to
‘murder’, reflects on the human condition in dreadful, catastrophic ways. In
these horses is hope, as well as agency.
Siobhan Hodge doesn’t see herself as
holier than thou, though she speaks from great empathy and authority. She also sees
herself as complicit — complicit in not being able to stop the slaughter, the
use and abuse of ‘horse flesh’, its consignment to the glue factory when past
its profitable days. I say ‘its’, because its personhood has been denied it —
from being seen as living organism to an almost worthless commodity that needs
changing into something useful. In a superb trilogy of prose poems, ‘Zebra’,
Hodge takes us on a picture-shooting safari through encounters with zebras: her
admiration, her awe, her point of contact, her epiphanies, her distress, our
shame. As in so many of the poems, ‘skin’ and ‘hair’ are so important — they
are the points of contact for horses and people — and it’s as skin and hair in
the airport when departing that the persona becomes closest to the zebra:
‘...zebras aren’t big
sellers alive, after all. Guide has better targets to net. A clearer shot will
come later, from the airport. I found you, by Departures, crisp bodies flat and
shining under lights between the gates. Tufts and bristles.’
The body reduced to ‘signage’ for
tourists — the most brutal of hollow signifiers. I am disturbed by the inherent threat in the
‘seeing’ (hunting is never far away from ‘watching’ in the world of trophyism)
and Siobhan configures this tension perfectly (in terms of the workings of the
poem).
One of the remarkable things about
Siobhan Hodge’s advocacy of horses, uncompromising and partisan as it is, is
that she also manages great cultural respect and sensitivity towards human
communities. Hers is not an obvious poetry — its pared back, impacted style is
so strongly drawn from the fragmentary remains of Sappho’s poetry, and a
scholarship that has fully comprehended the value of space around a poem — that
even ‘missing’ bits of a poem, the lacunae, are essential to our reading of the
world of the past, and in the here and now.
In communicating and communing with
horses (as far as a horse will allow!), there are necessarily gaps and spaces,
and it’s in these than the figurative generativeness of Siobhan’s verse might
be found. Also, her use of the short impacted line allows a riding poem like
‘In the Pines’, where rider and horse are ‘we’, to find a way through an often
inclement environment, following the path, the journey, acquiring knowledge and
dealing together with threat, stating and contemplating both beauty and trauma,
involved in a call and response relationship between each other, the place, and
us, the readers. And the whole time, the intensity and precision of the
language draw us into the place, the scenario, the relationship, compelled
under and between the pines:
Collective space in
shadow,
your black coat nips
encroaching sunset,
throw the lens astray
at lines we do not own
in fallen trees. Soaked
needles, lost maps and
each
breath shared...
and we feel the heartbeat under the
ribs, the closeness.
I’m frequently fascinated by the
shift between (displaced) ‘point of view’ of horse and human in the interaction.
There are times in some of the ‘riding’ poems, where the horse is being made to
perform and we slip into the horse’s sense of things, that the work opens
genuinely new ways of insight into humans per humans. Yet the horse is always
allowed to be itself, not co-opted; the book explores issues of appropriation
in so many ways. It’s also about the uses of history and the occlusion of
humans by other (predatory) humans’ activities; it is also the horse-realm as
well. Parallel and intersecting worlds. I am still pondering the ‘whip’ and its
tyranny of control, and there seems to be confessions of culpability and guilt
as well as accusation in there. The book is a confession and an analysis, a
prayer and a recounting.
I — we — might also admire that the work analyses
a different quality of ‘love’ and affection and ‘sharing’ outside the human-to-human,
without appropriating the animal into an exploitative situation. To have
familial warmth is not to use or abuse or to be entertained, but to be
gratified by the existence of the horse. Those people who use animals for
financial or physical or whatever benefit, will never see this unless works like
this one are written and said. It’s a love of familiarity and sharing and
respect, of difference and similarity. It’s the genuine empathy, compassion,
respect, admiration of horses that make this a creative, artistic and moral
triumph.
It’s also a very clever book, and it
needs to be, to articulate the all-too-often unspoken reality of human usage of
horses. It’s clever in its language-usage, its pinpoint allusions that make us
reflect on the language we use around all non-human life, and about what our
art actually means when it comes to the living world. It uses rhetoric to upset
our/the persona’s familiarities and sureties, to contest our safe positions,
such as in the poem ‘You know’, the brilliant and distressing conceit of Romeo
and Juliet and the fate of the horse, Romeo, and the failure to appreciate that
language is non-human as well; all this emanates from this collection in ways
that will, I hope, change the way we talk about human-animal interactions in
general, and, indeed, human-human interactions. Justice can be done, and
achieved.
And, as I launch this book, I want
to say how ably served the work is by Dennis Haskell’s astute and beautifully
‘condensed’ introduction — a piece of poetry in itself. One great poet
introducing the first full-length book of another, who will also bring a change
to how we discuss and perceive what language can do.
John Kinsella
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