Kieron Winn’s first collection of poems, The Mortal Man (2015),
takes its title from the name of a pub in the Lake District. Writing of
Winn’s work, the Irish poet Bernard O’Donoghue said: “[his]
poems have the unmistakable ring of the real thing. And once they have
got to you, you never forget their combination of exact emotion with
perfect form”.
Both “exact emotion” and “perfect form” are on full display in “First Photo”, first published in the TLS in 2010, where the speaker relates a memory of the first photograph he ever snapped, of his father holding his sister. Then he transports us to “a cousin’s farm”, where the certainty and comfort he had felt with that initial “click of the machine” quickly recedes. The “broad / Dull knife” he comes across “in the hen yard” perhaps represents his first encounter with the merciless fact of death. In the second stanza, however, after the truth of mortality has entered his young mind, he finds his father’s “warm, accustomed, skillful hand” and all seems “right” again. Yet thirty years later, when the father and now grown-up son share a finger tap in the car, the speaker realizes that this man, once so revered, no longer has all the answers or the ability to make everything appear “measured out and planned”. What “dies hard” is the childish, nostalgic urge to have our worries assuaged by the presence of a trusted parent and the strong hold of a familiar hand. (tls)
First Photo
There I took my first photo: dark-haired, keen,
My father folds my sister in one arm.
He smiles and hears the click of the machine,
The world of oil and men assumed like a blazer,
A blue pullover or a sweet-foiled razor.
Later, we visited a cousin’s farm
Where one brown room was waxed and Sunday-clean,
But half-sunk in the hen yard was a broad
Dull knife whose purpose came and left me awed.
I found his warm, accustomed, skilful hand,
And all was made right in his broad features,
And everything seemed measured out and planned.
Thirty years later and our fingers tap
When, as he drives, I pass a folded map.
I cannot bring a bucket of rock-pool creatures
And have him beam at me and understand,
But it dies hard, wanting someone to say
All will be well, with the power to make it so today.
KIERON WINN (2010)
Both “exact emotion” and “perfect form” are on full display in “First Photo”, first published in the TLS in 2010, where the speaker relates a memory of the first photograph he ever snapped, of his father holding his sister. Then he transports us to “a cousin’s farm”, where the certainty and comfort he had felt with that initial “click of the machine” quickly recedes. The “broad / Dull knife” he comes across “in the hen yard” perhaps represents his first encounter with the merciless fact of death. In the second stanza, however, after the truth of mortality has entered his young mind, he finds his father’s “warm, accustomed, skillful hand” and all seems “right” again. Yet thirty years later, when the father and now grown-up son share a finger tap in the car, the speaker realizes that this man, once so revered, no longer has all the answers or the ability to make everything appear “measured out and planned”. What “dies hard” is the childish, nostalgic urge to have our worries assuaged by the presence of a trusted parent and the strong hold of a familiar hand. (tls)
First Photo
There I took my first photo: dark-haired, keen,
My father folds my sister in one arm.
He smiles and hears the click of the machine,
The world of oil and men assumed like a blazer,
A blue pullover or a sweet-foiled razor.
Later, we visited a cousin’s farm
Where one brown room was waxed and Sunday-clean,
But half-sunk in the hen yard was a broad
Dull knife whose purpose came and left me awed.
I found his warm, accustomed, skilful hand,
And all was made right in his broad features,
And everything seemed measured out and planned.
Thirty years later and our fingers tap
When, as he drives, I pass a folded map.
I cannot bring a bucket of rock-pool creatures
And have him beam at me and understand,
But it dies hard, wanting someone to say
All will be well, with the power to make it so today.
KIERON WINN (2010)
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