{"id":4380,"date":"2016-01-12T14:53:57","date_gmt":"2016-01-12T14:53:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dev.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/?p=4380"},"modified":"2023-06-27T12:03:41","modified_gmt":"2023-06-27T12:03:41","slug":"the-seagull-now-eating-my-sandwich","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/2016\/01\/12\/the-seagull-now-eating-my-sandwich\/","title":{"rendered":"The Seagull now eating my sandwich by Emily Wills"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Seagull now eating my sandwich\u00a0\u00a0 by Emily Wills
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

computes a multimap of all the local take-outs
\nbehind his brassy glare. Bird-brained, above us all,
\nhe sat-navs through south-westerlies, tunnels low cloud,
\nchampions right of way over starling and rook.<\/p>\n

Inland, he takes his Welcome Break, a chocolate-
\nchurning field, wormy with screech and stab.
\nWhichever familiar of mine ploughs up these parallels
\ndrives on, his Massey Ferguson unnoticed as a bird would be<\/p>\n

on Google earth. Refuelled, my sleek-headed plunderer
\nunfolds his creased, delineate wings, then hits
\nthe tarmac of the sky. From the outside lane
\nhe landmarks services \u2013 MacDonald’s car parks,<\/p>\n

bus stops, playgrounds, bins \u2013 his focal point
\nthe sea. Here is the stoneground beach
\ncrusted with cliffs, its trolley-dash of fishing boats
\nunloading their cheap-as-chips along the quay,<\/p>\n

and here I sit, gulled, open-mouthed, unmapped.<\/p>\n

I’m usually wary of poems where the title runs straight into the first line, but this works, enlarging the immediacy of the ‘NOW’, the shock of the event. There’s such a lot going on in this poem (and here’s one of the whys of my liking poetry, its ability to layer so much together in short spaces). There’s energy and movement ‘sat-navs’, ‘tunnels’, ‘churning’, ‘drives’, ‘refuelled’, ‘hits the tarmac’ etc: there’s comment about maleness, or a kind of maleness \u2013 the gull is ‘he’, and the kind of he that speeds about on motorways (there was a time when a ‘rep’ was a travelling salesman, not a set of gym exercises). There’s also the tractor driver, referred to as ‘familiar’ \u2013 there’s more about him, I think, in the poem ‘Long Lane’ on page 14 of the pamphlet. There’s perspective, ‘above us all’, ‘Google earth’, with its ultra zoom facility, there’s urban slang, ‘trolley-dash’, ‘cheap as chips’, there’s elegant language, ‘sleek-headed plunderer’ in one line followed by ‘his creased, delineate wings’ ( and I’m suddenly thinking of G.M. Hopkins’ and his ‘The Windhover<\/em>‘). In short there’s four stanzas of general ‘screech and stab’, and then a space and the complete change of the last line, slowed to stillness ‘and here I sit’, ‘gulled’ (which is a fine old Shakespearian word meaning fooled\/exploited) ‘open-mouthed’ as in about to eat the stolen sandwich but also speechless\/about to speak, and the mysterious ‘unmapped’, which I take to be, in previously unknown territory\/ not knowing quite where. It’s also the title word of the pamphlet which adds a resonance \u2013 something about the shock of unfamiliarity. And it helps us to know that this poem is also about different visions, seeing differently, maybe not with the ‘brassy glare’.<\/p>\n

Michael Mackmin<\/em><\/p>\n

Image from German lithograph 1878. ‘Die M\u00f6wen genie\u00dfen das Ei und Kresse im Besonderen’ by Kurt Silberm\u00f6we.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m usually wary of poems where the title runs straight into the first line, but this works, enlarging the immediacy of the ‘NOW’, the shock of the event. There’s such a lot going on in this poem (and here’s one of the whys of my liking poetry, its ability to layer so much together in short spaces). <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":4389,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[204],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4380","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4380","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4380"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4380\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6110,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4380\/revisions\/6110"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4389"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4380"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4380"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4380"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}