"The Caravan", from Clare Pollard's new collection, Changeling, is an exuberant and almost windswept poem. "We were alive that evening…" it begins, declaring a colloquial register and a freewheeling rhythm of rangy couplets with a hint of rhyme. The caravan may be static, but the poem, as it moves along the curve of remembered happiness and sombre nightfall, seems to mirror the rolling moors and big sky of its North Yorkshire setting.
The secret of its evolving narrative energy is that each sentence in the poem is longer than the last. The first takes up two lines, the second, six, the third, eight, and the last (beginning "Smoke and stars meant my thoughts loosened") flows on for 12. The caesuras throughout are minimal, comma-sized breaths in the breathless rush.
Static objects (often gathered into lists) and live creatures moving around freely outdoors are contrasted. We begin with emblems of luxury – even the pheasants have "feathers as richly patterned/ as Moroccan rugs". The simile leads naturally into the detail about the seductively furnished Roma caravan ("candles, a rose-cushioned bed, etched glass"). But the outdoors romance soon takes over, with fire-building, muddy boots, the joint, rolled "with dirty hands", and the wine, "sloshing" (lovely, carefree word) "into beakers". We already know this is a love poem, and the "you" is both a sharer of the experience, and part of the scene that's so joyfully described. All the abundance comes together in the image of the moon, "a huge cauldron of light". The stuff of wedded and working life – emails, the mortgage and the broken washing-machine – fleetingly appears, but the wind "blasts" it away. (If only… )
Perhaps the qualification of "the wild" ( "or as close as we can now get to the wild") has already sounded a warning-note. It alerts us to human encroachment on the natural world: the homographs, wild/wild, enact the claustrophobia. But it's when we get to the variously-suggestive line "and I knew your hands would later catch in my hair" that the real "turn" occurs, and a darker thought, the predations of humans upon each other, suddenly appears in the erotic dusk.
The chime of "hair/snare," one of relatively few full rhymes, stands out almost artlessly. The word "snare," of course, recalls Sylvia Plath's dread-ridden "The Rabbit Catcher" - surely no accident. Pollard's far happier couple, too, occupies "a place of force".
An undertone of fear ("I/… would watch, dry-mouthed") will be exposed and confronted in two stunning last lines. Meanwhile, the wedding ring seems like a chain, encircling not the finger but, implicitly, the hands. These hands will "catch" tenderly in the lover's hair – but the verb "catch" might also imply being caught. The emotional charge intensifies, now, as the speaker sets out to abolish these entrapments, which she perhaps suspects herself of causing, with an impassioned flight of avowals and disavowals.
The syntax is further simplified, giving the lines the repetitive, cumulative thrust of a folk-song or fable: "And if you were a hawk… /And if you were a rabbit." For all the intensity, there's a glimmer of teasing humour in the image of "gambolling through the bracken" but this is quickly overcast by the x-ray vision of "dark meat packed around your ribs". The unhooded hawk has become the vulnerable prey.
In its mood of erotic celebration, "The Caravan" shares something with the genre of the epithalamium, while venturing farther towards the downside of committed love. Also a holiday poem, the modern equivalent of pastoral, it turns the anarchic delight of playing Gypsies in "the wild" into a sombre education in the costs of freedom.
So, finally, in a poem full of movement, we are left with a dramatic, archetypal image of predation. The hawk, no longer identified with the "you" of the poem, is again suspended in the sky. Beautiful feathers and dark meat seem barely an inch apart. Perhaps a little like Elizabeth Bishop at the end of "The Fish", the speaker lets go – or promises to let go. "I would not want you tame" is the poem's keynote: taming would be death, or worse. Love's generosity appears to have triumphed thrillingly over its possessiveness. But the hawk, like a rival, remains poised to swoop, and readers are still holding their breath when the poem ends.
The Caravan
We were alive that evening, on the north Yorkshire moors,
in a valley of scuffed hills and smouldering gorse.
Pheasants strutted, their feathers as richly patterned
as Moroccan rugs, past the old Roma caravan –
candles, a rose-cushioned bed, etched glass –
that I'd hired to imagine us gipsies
as our bacon and bean stew bubbled,
as you built a fire, moustached, shirt-sleeves rolled.
It kindled and started to lick, and you laughed
in your muddy boots, there in the wild –
or as close as we can now get to the wild -
skinning up a joint with dirty hands, sloshing wine
into beakers, the sky turning heather with night,
the moon a huge cauldron of light,
the chill wind blasting away our mortgage,
emails, bills, TV, our broken washing machine.
Smoke and stars meant my thoughts loosened,
and took off like the owls that circled overhead,
and I knew your hands would later catch in my hair,
hoped the wedding ring on them never seemed a snare –
for if you were a traveller I would not make you settle,
but would have you follow your own weather,
and if you were a hawk I would not have you hooded,
but would watch, dry-mouthed, as you hung above the fields,
and if you were a rabbit I would not want you tame,
but would watch you gambolling through the bracken,
though there is dark meat packed around your ribs,
and the hawk hangs in the skies.