Between 1837 and 1840 on the Glengarry estate in Inverness-shire, gamekeepers’ tally books show them to have killed 63 hen harriers, 63 goshawks, 98 peregrines, 27 white-tailed sea eagles, 15 golden eagles, 18 ospreys, six gyrfalcons, 11 hobbies, 275 kites, 285 buzzards, 462 kestrels, 78 merlins and 35 horned owls, as well as 198 wildcats, 246 pine martens and hundreds of assorted other mustelids and corvids.
Today, you read these notorious records doubly amazed: that wildlife slaughter on this scale should have been permissible – and that it should have been possible. Sixty-three goshawks on a single estate? Sixty-three hen harriers? Eighteen ospreys? Six gyrfalcons? Such abundance now seems fabulous, for the avian predator populations of upland Britain have never really recovered from the massacres they underwent in the 19th century. The 1954 Protection of Birds Act outlawed the killing of any bird of prey except the sparrowhawk (protection for which followed in 1962), but illegal persecution has, atrociously, persisted – especially on and around grouse moors. Raptors are still regularly shot and poisoned, and their nest sites wrecked. Successful prosecutions for these crimes are rare.
Among the species to have suffered most is the hen harrier, Circus cyaneus, a beautiful hawk known also as the “ringtail” and (in the north of England) the “gled”. According to the RSPB, only four pairs bred in England in 2014. This year, three male harriers – distinctive for their ash-blue plumage – have disappeared without explanation, leading to failed nests. South of the border, in short, the gled is on the brink of extinction – “regularly trodden underfoot / in the interests of gamebirds”, as Colin Simms writes in one of the 270 poems about hen harriers gathered in this remarkable collection.
I was introduced to Simms’s poetry a decade or so ago by Helen Macdonald, who generously gave me a copy of his 1995 pamphlet Goshawk Lives. The verse was like nothing else I knew: strange sonnets seething with bird energy, long lines thick with axe-knock stresses, and an open field poetic of gaps and flickers, spasms and chasms. Language in these poems had been torqued and harrowed to fit – for example – the glimpse of a low-flying goshawk:
Fellow, the eyes stream on recognition / after the hollerin scream / its stream-sense planing its hollow in below-plateau /
eye yellow and yellowing
Smitten, I learned more about Simms’s life – he was born in 1939 – as a naturalist and poet based in the north of England: his friendships with Basil Bunting and Hugh MacDiarmid; his fierce independence from both academic institution and poetic school; his fieldwork across the northern hemisphere (Afghanistan, North America, Scandinavia); the thousands of natural historical papers he had published – and the thousands of poems, too, most of them scattered in small-press chapbooks, almost all falling within what Simms called “a fresh genre of natural history verse-making, dealing with experience of a single species”. In the early 2000s, Shearsman Books began the valuable task of collecting Simms’s poems from the previous half century and organising them by landscape and creature. Otters and Martens appeared in 2004, then came The American Poems (2005), the dazzling Gyrfalcon Poems (2007), Poems from Afghanistan (2013), and now there is Hen Harrier Poems.
“I look at the bird and only slowly over the years see it / who has seen me from the first”, he writes of the harrier. Simms’s two great subjects as a poet are the observation of nature and the nature of observation, and for him “seeing” – as opposed to mere “looking” – is a discipline, born of concentration and “repetition”. To know wild birds well one must “know / accumulatively”, and so he has returned repeatedly to the habitat of the harriers, watching them for days each week, weeks each year, hunkered uncomfortably in a “pleat of limestone” or “behind [a] dyke”. Many of the poems here detail the place and date of the encounters they describe: “Eskdalemuir 1955”, “North Pennines 1999”. Sight-specific and site-specific, they hover between field notes and finished texts. Gathered in number, they are a body of work that has been (to borrow a memorable verb from the earth sciences) “ground-truthed”: walked and watched into words over 60 years.
Watching is never, for Simms, an easy matter –
These hours of brightness polishing snowfield so she learns / iceblink binocular as I slowly can adjust burns / retina to control perceptions until sight discerns / under and over glare
– and reading him is correspondingly demanding. It requires slow “adjustment” to tolerate the “glare” of his grammar, the “burn’”of his language. His verse calls for attention, patience, and an understanding that disruptions of custom are carried out as a means of accuracy-to-incident rather than as a form of game. His poems are themselves events, and their raggedness is a rebuke to the glass-bead finish of much contemporary poetry.
“I was brought up in a hard school of disciplined ornithologists,” he declares, “and have my own strict standards.” Among those standards is an insistence on what he calls the “isness” of the creatures he studies: “I don’t live in their world and won’t,” as he bluntly puts it. His verse contains no projections, no shamanic strivings for transformation, and no attempts to think like a hawk. Another “standard” is his egalitarian interest in all aspects of harrier behaviour. Male hen harriers are rightly celebrated for their “sky‑dancing”, a spectacular display of twists, rolls, steep climbs and dives. But to Simms, the sky-dance is no more or less significant than the harrier’s stealthy hunting flight, or its dietary and alimentary tendencies. Anyone opening this book should be ready to stomach poems with titles such as “Harriers Digesting Rodents at Roost”.
For specificity, not psychodrama, is at the source of Simms’s lyricism. When he describes the “minute correcting adjustments” of the hen harrier’s wing feathers as it flies its predatory circuits, he could be referring to his own poetry, which often weaves back over its own lines to become a kind of recursively patterned loom work, designed to catch the gled’s “isness”. Even the dialect terms delved from what he calls “the Northern word hoard”– “frass”, “haugh”, “ing”, “glidder” and others – are used to root and place precisely, present not as exotica but as exactica. Combined with this commitment to accuracy, though, is Simm’s awareness that language is at last too loose-meshed a net with which to fetch a bird’s being: “I stumble across, unable / to begin to translate / her passage across the horizon”.
Simms has always positioned himself outside the stockade, and the more conversational of these poems prickle with an ornery disdain for “mainstream media”, southrons, the “so-called conservation lobby”, and in particular for “birders” and “twitchers” who sweep into an area to tick a species and then breeze out again, believing themselves to have “seen” the bird. Interestingly, Simms more than once casts doubt on the RSPB’s assessment of the current hen harrier population in England, suggesting that the bird can be found in slightly larger numbers by those who know where to look.
Nevertheless, Hen Harrier Poems rings both with respect for its subject’s “grace” and concern for its future. The ethos of the book is one of attention sacralised over time into devotion, with alterity rather than empathy as the basis of its love. I have come to think – and this new volume confirms to me – that Simms’s poetry of the last half-century is of huge importance, thrilling for the rigour and commitment of its vision. So as the shotguns boom out this week over the grouse moors on the absurdly named Glorious Twelfth, those who find themselves appalled at the plight of the hen harrier should do two things: join the campaign for increased protection of the species, and read Colin Simms’s poetry. “The best poems should take flight in us,” he writes, “as the bird must, to be a bird.”
• To order Hen Harrier Poems for £12.95 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
• Robert Macfarlane’s Landmarks is published by Hamish Hamilton.
• The RSPB’s hen harrier appeal is at rspb.org.uk.
