“The Fishermen”
There are two titular characters to this poem which winds up being more of a love poem than a vocational study piece. The fishermen have just returned to port after conducting their business at sea. Home for those who making their living fishing out at sea is one of sullen glances from a wife, sacrificing breakfast toast to the kids, a bath heater that isn’t working right and which won’t fixed on this day, shrieking children of regret and getting stinking drunk at the pub. The savior for this fisherman is the hand extended to lift him to his feet by partner with the broken teeth who arrives to facilitate his escape back out to sea.
The Mother, “In Departing Light”
In this sad verse in which the speaker describes a typical meeting with his ninety-year-old mother, the focus is entirely on the parent. She is broken physically to the point of always seeming to halfway be hanging out of her wheelchair, but it is the mental deterioration which is the true origin of the pathos. The mother is clearly suffering from dementia or Alzheimer’s and thus capable of speech that is so detached from rational thought that he compares her to a surrealist poet.
Man and Woman, “Harbour Dusk”
The man is the speaker in this poem, but that he is accompanied by a woman is vital to deciphering its meaning. Wandering together across an empty park deposits them on a crumbling harbor wall with a view of yachts across the way. The imagery is relentlessly bleak from the empty park to the wall’s fading life. The shore in the distance beneath an overcast sky is comprised of crumbling bush and yachts float upon empty fields of water. It is not stated outright, but the imagery all points to the imminent conclusion of the relationship between the couple.
The Lone Figure on the Beach, “Byron Bay: Winter”
The speaker of this dramatic monologue describes the arc of the beach marked with foliage right out of Cezanne painting. He is alone on the beach with the lights of the town in the distance. Sandpipers fly above while mice scurry below to escape being prey. The poem closes on the feeling this moment gives the speaker: “that I wear great wings / while stepping along the earth.”
The New Hire, “The Meat Works”
This is another dramatic monologue, but one completely different from that by the man on the beach. Where his surroundings are beautiful and gives him a sense of walking with wings, the new hire at the slaughterhouse is surrounding by pigs, blood, ice rooms, and intestines to be filled with meat. He accidentally drops a tool in a machine which grinds to a halt and cause the lights to flicker, but being as it is his first day on the job, he manages to avoid being fired. By poem’s end, he is meeting up with wife and concocting justifications in the form of flawed analogies that don’t really serve the purpose of making going to work any easier.
