Skirrid Hill by Owen Sheers, and The Wolf poetry magazine

I am staying with my mum in where she lives in Wales over Christmas and luckily for me she has introduced me to a poet who comes from this part of the world: Owen Sheers. He's a young poet, and is very popular with a local shopkeeper just up our lane. I have begun his poetry collection 'Skirrid Hill' (the Skirrid is a mountain over the county border from us in Monmouthshire, and has a very distinctive silhouette) although he has also written a novel and some non-fiction, and has won lots of prestigious prizes and accolades for all his work.

So, Skirrid Hill, by Owen Sheers. Now here is a poetic talent. From one of the first poems in the collection, 'Mametz Wood', it was clear that Sheers can stick ordinary words together and make music with them: 'broken bird's egg of a skull', the delicious oxymoron of 'nesting machine guns'. Poems such as 'Winter Swans' and 'Keyways' continue this ('porcelain over the stilling water'; 'the milling and grooves/ of moments in time'). Relationships and separations are the key themes of the collection but are represented in very original ways and a real playful but understated use of language.

I have also been reading issue 23 of The Wolf magazine, but this is a completely different experience to the elation I feel over reading one of Sheers' carefully constructed, thoughtful poems. Perhaps the best thing about the magazine is the use of Scott Anderson's amazing artwork (I'd call it half Dali, half Bacon). The poetry is pretentious and seems to be excruciatingly intellectual for pretension's sake. Evan Jones' 'Self Portrait with Argos the Hundred-Eyed' had me groaning from the first line ('many-eyer, many-eyer...') and Alfred Corn's 'Cheiromancy' is incomprehensible without extensive use of a dictionary (perhaps just down to my own lack of intellect, but something that has nonetheless marred my enjoyment of the poem). I have reread that particular poem several times, trying to decipher it, and even after looking up the numerous words that I didn't understand I still have no idea what the poem is about. The translated works that make up a large part of the magazine are quite interesting, and there is also lots of criticism included. An interview with Alfred Corn makes as much high-brow sense as his poetry. Cool artwork, nice quality paper, but all I can say is give me Magma any day!

Owen Sheers' work is the complete opposite. His use of language is innovative but without pretentiousness. The works are thoughtful and confident, whereas The Wolf smacks of try-hard-wannabe-let's-see-how-many-long-words-I-can-fit-in-a-single-poem. I will definitely be reading more of Sheers in the future.