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| 'Hedge Sparrows' was read by actor Jim Broadbent on BBC Radio Scotland this morning. |
Richard Price's poem 'Hedge Sparrows' was chosen to represent Great Britain as part of Poetry 2012: The Written World. This unique Cultural Olympiad project spearheaded by the Scottish Poetry Library in partnership with the BBC has gathered poems from all 204 competing nations. Here, Richard Price discusses the poem and its origins.
I wrote ‘Hedge sparrows’ as one of the pieces in a bestiary – a traditional gathering of poems about creatures. It’s influenced by Aesop’s fables, by Apollinaire, and by Douglas Lipton, all well-known for the sly fun they have with imagining a hybrid animal-human world. I’m sure the Aardman adverts for ‘Creature Comforts’ are somewhere in there, too. I’m a child of a kind, really, and I like to play.
My poems about living things aren’t pretending that living things are like humans. Rather they are reminders, in a lateral way, that humans may be very specialised animals but we are yet to specialise ourselves beyond Nature’s category. We will be dead if we do so. Sometimes we appear to want Nature to die watching our attempt (though of course Nature will not die, even if many of its species, including ourselves, might well), but my feeling is generally an optimistic one, even so. I have a feeling this may mean that ‘Hedge sparrows’ is in that dread genre, ‘the eco-poem’ or ‘the radical pastoral’. Yes, it is.
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| Edwin Morgan (1920-20210) was Scotland's first Makar, or National Poet. |
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| 'Hedge Sparrows' is taken from Lucky Day (Carcanet, 2005) |
The poem being chosen to represent Great Britain in the Olympic celebrations was such a surprise. I am delighted by this! I am English, because my parents were, and I am Scottish, because I grew up in Scotland. My surname suggests I am, much further back, either from Welsh stock or from Anglo-Norman (the same word has very different origins); I am also part Spanish. Though this could have had nothing to do with choosing the poem, maybe, somehow, that background of fabulous commonality is in the poem? If I had chosen dogs as my theme I would say, as others have, that we are mongrel nations within a mongrel nation, and I like the sound of almost every bark! Or, to change the metaphor, I can see layers of rough-and-ready national identity dry-packed in the concept of Great Britain even as the set of nations begins to discuss just how it wants to adjust the wrapper, perhaps even slip the wrapper off. We should talk more. I remember with fondness my mother and father’s love of British Racing Green, of the British-French achievement of Concord, of points of excellence which of course aren’t ‘national’ as such – the invention of penicillin, the invention of television in England by a Scot, and so on – and that affection and a kind of belief in what people within the ‘British’ umbrella can achieve, has already shifted to a belief in what the home nations might achieve individually beyond it, too. I am disheartened by some of the suppression of protest around the Olympics because we should be so much bigger than that: there is a politics which will in the end out-manoeuvre the unsettling two headed machine that is state and multinational joined as one, and though 'Hedge Sparrows' is just a fun little poem I hope it’s a friendly reminder of that.
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'Hedge Sparrows' by Richard Price
from Lucky Day
You don't see many hedges these days, and the hedges you do see they're not that thorny, it's a shame, and when I say a hedge I'm not talking about a row of twigs between two lines of rusty barbed wire, or more likely just a big prairie where there were whole cities of hedges not fifty years ago, a big desert more like, and I mean thick hedges, with trees nearby for a bit of shade and a field not a road not too far off so you can nip out for an insect or two when you or the youngsters feel like a snack, a whole hedgerow system, as it says in the book, and seven out of ten sparrows say the same, and that's an underestimate, we want a place you can feel safe in again, we're social animals, we want our social life back, and the sooner the better, because in a good hedge you can always talk things over, make decisions, have a laugh if you want to, sing, even with a voice like mine!
This weekend only, get 20% off all Richard Price's books
at Carcanet.co.uk - and free UK delivery!
Richard Price was born in 1966 and grew up in Scotland. He trained as a journalist at Napier College, Edinburgh, before studying English at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. The youngest of the Informationist group of poets, he was a founder of the magazines associated with them, Gairfish and Southfields. He is also the co-founder of Vennel Press, the imprint which brought many of the earlier Informationist collections to a wider audience. He is Head of Modern British Collections at the British Library, London.