Contemporary Poetry

environment and space 139

ing is introduced: ‘Sparks had furred its low roof. In dawn-light
the troughed water fl oated a damson-bloom of dust’ (p. 129 ). Hill’s
inclusion of compound colour-descriptors, musical resonances as
well as Anglo-Saxon and Latinate phrases reinforces the density of
the poem as strata of competing timeframes and languages.
Near the close, in hymnet twenty-eight, we are presented
with a cartographer’s view of the area depicting: ‘The process of
generations; deeds of settlement’ (p. 132 ). Michel de Certeau’s
distinction between panoptic vision above a settlement, and the
pedestrian experience of its inhabitants, offers a way of consid-
ering the different perspectives of place in Mercian Hymns. De
Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life ( 1984 ) suggests that the
desire to view or map the city from such a height betrays a desire
to theorise, with the panoptic spectator becoming a ‘voyeur-god’.^16
By contrast, the practitioners of the settlement live ‘down below’
(p. 93 ). De Certeau’s commentary draws an evocative description
of the labyrinthine and the frequently illegible passage of people:
‘The networks of these moving intersecting writings compose a
manifold story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped out of
fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces’ (p. 93 ). Mercian
Hymns is intent on showing a landscape etched with ‘tracks of
ancient occupation’ in ‘Groves of legendary holly; silverdark the
ridged gleam’ (p. 132 ).
Robert Hass’s work recreates with a keen botanist’s eye the
history and physical shaping of his environment. A native of
Northern California, he inscribes the fl ora and fauna of the San
Francisco Bay Area in his fi rst volume, Field Guide ( 1973 ), as the
titles of some of the poems indicate: ‘On the Coast near Sausalito’,
‘Black Mountain, Los Altos’, ‘At Stinson Beach’, ‘Palo Alto: The
Marshes’.^17 In this last long poem Hass delights in the naming of
his environment:

Walking, I recite the hard

explosive names of birds:

egret, kildeer, bittern, tern.

Dull in the wind and early morning light,

the striped shadows of cattails

twitch like nerves. (p. 24 )