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[[Poem|1]]\n[[Commentary]]\n<div style="padding-top: 30px;">\n<span style="font-size: 0.8em; font-weight: normal;">Sidekick Play-Poems use the Twine engine and Sugarcube story format.</span></div>
For me, the line that is most loaded in this poem is ‘grousing at something someone forgot to tell you’. It's both a neat, incredibly spare characterisation of the bird, in a poem which is largely about the huntsman, and a hinting at death, which so often arrives in the manner of an important detail someone neglected to mention.\n\nThe other detail which makes the scene rather more than literal is the ‘safe-house in the heather’. Chris Beckett's grouse is a kind of existential wanted criminal, born on the run. It's a very subtle reminder of a theme often explored in cop films and detective stories – that the instincts of hunter and hunted are still at large in human nature. “This empty house is my tree, and you are my tiger!” Sherlock Holmes declares to the freshly arrested game shooter Colonel Sebastian Moran. “The parallel is exact.”\n\nHence the hunter is ‘married to his kill’, but not, as Beckett's protagonist observes, when the relationship becomes buried in the sheer scale of the killing, the heap of bodies.\n\nAs a final point, this is an interesting poem to read in the light of this year's outcry over the killing of Cecil the lion. The image of the newly ‘married’, bloodied buffalo hunter recalls the photograph of Walter Palmer and compatriot squatting over their prone victim (the compatriot looking like he might even be sexually violating Cecil). Why do we accept the ritual slaughter of game birds but not lions? Is it not all a case of, as David Attenborough said, “the terrible state of the human psyche”?\n\n\n<span class="brightlink">[[Return to poem|previous()]]</span>\n<a class="set2" data-passage="Start">Return to front page</a>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Vollkorn">\s\n<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Nunito"><div style="display: inline-block; width: 80%; height: 115px; line-height: 17px;">\s\n<div style="float: left; width: 100px;"><span class="fade"><a href="http://www.sidekickbooks.com" target="_top"><img src="http://www.sidekickbooks.com/sidekicklogocolour.png" width="100px"></a></span></div>\s\n<span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 0.8em;">the</span> sidekick<br/><span style="font-size: 0.9em;">PLAY-POEM</span><br/><span style="font-size: 0.9em;">A R C H I V E</span></span></div>
The earth's damp ear\nis cocked –\n<<replacelink "<div id=\s"circle\s"></div>">>when sticks and spaniels\nbeat the door of your safe-house in the heather,\n\n<<timedinsert 4s>>you throw your feathers onto the wind<<endtimedinsert>>\n<<timedinsert 6s>>wobbling this way and that,<<endtimedinsert>>\n<<timedinsert 8s>>upwards and sideways,<<endtimedinsert>>\n<<timedinsert 10s>>grousing at something someone forgot to tell you.<<endtimedinsert>>\n\n<<timedinsert 11s>>\n<a data-passage="2"><div id="circle"></div></a><<endtimedinsert>><<endreplacelink>>\n
<span style="color:#ff0066;">RED GROUSE</span>\n<span style="font-size: 0.8em;">by CHRIS BECKETT</span>\n\nClick the pink circle to advance. Use backspace to retread.\n<a data-passage="1"><div id="circle"></div></a>\n<span style="font-size: 0.9em;">\nThis poem is published in hard copy format in <a class="set2" href="http://sidekickbooks.com/birdbookiii.php" target="_top"><i>Birdbook: Farmland, Heathland, Mountain, Moorland</i>.</a></span>\n\n<span class="fade" style="width:auto;"><a href="http://sidekickbooks.com/birdbookiii.php" target="_top"><img class="shadowed" style="margin-left: 30px;" src="http://sidekickbooks.com/images/birdbookiii-smallcover.jpg"></a></span>
Later there are sixty of you piled\nin the pick-up,\n<<timedinsert 3s>>so I cannot locate you, my first and only kill.<<endtimedinsert>><<timedinsert 4s>>\n<<replacelink "<div id=\s"circle\s"></div>">>I will never take proper pride in you,\n\n<<timedinsert 3s>>nor in my self as hunter,<<endtimedinsert>>\n<<timedinsert 4s>>because<<endtimedinsert>>\n<<timedinsert 5s>>as the Bambara of Mali shout proudly to their wives,\nwhen they return blood-spattered,<<endtimedinsert>> <<timedinsert 8s>>hooting,<<endtimedinsert>> <<timedinsert 9s>>hugging the carcass of buffalo:<<endtimedinsert>><<timedinsert 10s>>\n<<replacelink "<div id=\s"circle\s"></div>">>\n<i>the hunter is married to his kill!</i>\n\n\n<<timedinsert 2s>><a class="set2" data-passage="Start">Return to front page</a><<endtimedinsert>><<endreplacelink>><<endtimedinsert>><<endreplacelink>><<endtimedinsert>>
I am one of the hunters who recoils\nwhen his gun barks\n<<timedinsert 2s>>and my volley of shot joins a great boom in the sky.<<endtimedinsert>>\n<<timedinsert 3s>><<replacelink "<div id=\s"circle\s"></div>">>Your small red sack of spuds jerks up, then plummets over the hill brow.\n\n\n<a data-passage="3"><div id="circle"></div></a><<endreplacelink>><<endtimedinsert>>
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Red grouse
Chris Beckett
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