An aspect of a horse’s training provides some unsettling analogies with the powers that humans learn to accept
Miriam Gamble’s new collection, Pirate Music, extends her interrogation of human-animal relations, and includes an affectionate focus on horses. But no one approaching this week’s poem, Bodies, should be lulled into thinking “Oh, another horse poem – been there, read that …”. Gamble’s anthropomorphism is distinctly not of the obvious or sentimental kind.
Bodies contains a parable woven around the two particular things the junior horse “must learn” – namely, “to carry its own weight/ through the use of its quarters” and “to take a contact on the mouth”. The colt learns instinctively to balance upright on four legs, although the word “use” might hint at more intrusive burdens later on. But the “contact on the mouth” implies a sharper curb, the horse made subject to a human control that’s immediately seen as problematic.
In a vivid and uncomfortable comparison, this invasive “contact” is “light but present like the watchful eye of the law/ when one is a fundamentally law-abiding citizen”. Drily amused the tone may be, but the analogy leaves us in no doubt of the relentlessness of the curb.
Born in 1980, Gamble grew up in Belfast. Her work subtly unravels the fallacy of references to a “post-Troubles” generation. Conflict impinges on childhood in various ways, and one of the forms it may take is in strictures about speech. The repressive “contact on the mouth” in Bodies seems to connect with that famous injunction, “whatever you say, say nothing” – a requirement which, beyond merely recommending silence, may involve a duplicity or trivialisation that poets, in particular, can ill-afford.
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Bodies contains a parable woven around the two particular things the junior horse “must learn” – namely, “to carry its own weight/ through the use of its quarters” and “to take a contact on the mouth”. The colt learns instinctively to balance upright on four legs, although the word “use” might hint at more intrusive burdens later on. But the “contact on the mouth” implies a sharper curb, the horse made subject to a human control that’s immediately seen as problematic.
In a vivid and uncomfortable comparison, this invasive “contact” is “light but present like the watchful eye of the law/ when one is a fundamentally law-abiding citizen”. Drily amused the tone may be, but the analogy leaves us in no doubt of the relentlessness of the curb.
Born in 1980, Gamble grew up in Belfast. Her work subtly unravels the fallacy of references to a “post-Troubles” generation. Conflict impinges on childhood in various ways, and one of the forms it may take is in strictures about speech. The repressive “contact on the mouth” in Bodies seems to connect with that famous injunction, “whatever you say, say nothing” – a requirement which, beyond merely recommending silence, may involve a duplicity or trivialisation that poets, in particular, can ill-afford.
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