The Black Hole

A ring of down-feathers surrounds the corpse
of the blackbird, thickly leaved like pages
of a burnt book. The cat steels himself at
their stirring perimeter. I've seen him
biff a robin's carcass to make it look
lively, crunching into the ginger-nut
of its breast, but he seems to teeter on
the brink of the blackbird — the breezy shiv—
er of charred down-feathers — the eyes,
a scuffed sequin of blood. If the fallout
stirs, he smacks his lips, as he does when he
perceives a threat. His flanks palpitate, star-
ing down into the black hole by mistake.

(‘The Black Hole’ from Byssus by Jen Hadfield, published by Picador, 2014.)

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To get at an appreciation of Jen’s poem I’d like to start by referring to the recent article posted by Robert Pinsky in the edX course ‘The Art of Poetry.’ He starts there by unapologetically answering the question “why poetry?” Why poetry when YouTube, when Spotify, when games like Skyrim? At a time when we have unprecedented access to such vast quantities of sophisticated and immersive media “why this ancient practice of artful words, on the scale of the human voice?”

Pleasure is not often argued for in defence of poetry, yet the world also had an advocate in the British poet Philip Larkin. Ready to bite the bullet as always, Larkin conceded that if writing a poem isn’t entertaining, why write? Going on to say that sometimes he “deliberately let it compete in the open market… with other spare-time activities.” What these ‘other spare-time’ activities were in England in the 1960s I don’t know. Listening to the odd record perhaps? Going for a stroll in the park, participating — or not, as the case may be — in the sexual revolution? Maybe this is why the ‘pleasure’ argument for poetry doesn’t crop up much now-a-days. After all, how can it compete on the open market, against the rabid demands that now exist on our spare-time?



Pinsky has an answer. It is in that phrase of his “on the scale of the human voice.” And that appeals to me. Out of the blur of days when the competition is soundly trounced by computer games or the endless busy work of TV series, poetry rises like a modest diversion, a pleasurable concentration. And Jen’s poem, which I first read back in July, in the attractive 19.6 x 15.2 Byssus, has given me the kind of conviction Pinsky talks about, that feeling of “a kind of physical as well as intellectual sensation.”

It is remarkable how something as simple as a neatly printed black square on a page, can transfix you time and time again. Can pull you away from the sprawling mass of dutiful ‘entertainment’, render the sorting of brightly coloured sweets, as Julia Bird put it, irrelevant.

What I love about this poem, can’t stop looking at and listening to, is that it sounds like a normal person speaking. It sounds like someone I know and says things I can imagine myself and them saying. The cat “steels himself”, “biffs” the bird and crunches “into the ginger-nut / of its breast.” The idiomatic verve of the poem makes it familiar, easy to get to grips with, and appealing.

Yet, like Pinsky’s analysis of Hayden’s ‘Those Winter Sundays’, it’s the fracture of the slightly too formal that I think is what draws me back. Without the elegiac chill of the initial “a ring of down-feathers surrounds the corpse” and ritualistic language like the description of the bird’s eye as “a scuffed sequin of blood.” Without these elements what would it be? A poem about a poet’s cat, which is a poem we’ve all read and forgotten. But this is about much more and is much darker.

I can’t stop staring at the penultimate line-break. How the switch, the shift off of ‘staring’, breaks the word on ‘star’, that quiet gesture suggesting life on a whole other scale. For the poem to end on ‘mistake’, as well.

What I first complacently read as a ‘cat lady poem’ ends up terrifying the shit out of me. Moreover, because it ties you down into it. You’re the one ‘star- / ing’ down into ‘the black hole’ of the poem. You’re the one trapped, transfixed by your own — what? Fascination? Pinsky describes the effect of Hayden’s poem as a “web of feelings” where he feels “that kind of conflict and ambivalence, fear and love, muteness and expressiveness”

I’m like that with this poem. Fly in a web. Fly feeling the vibrations of the web, and we all know what that means. I wouldn’t normal have thought the fly’d get much pleasure from feeling like that but there we are. Flying about must be exhausting. Good to be suspended for a change.

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My thanks to the author Jen Hadfield and her publisher Sarah Blake from Picador, for permission to reproduce this poem here on ROY.