Flight of the White Horse

I first discovered Giles Watson's The Flight of the White Horse this winter, through his wonderful video presentation of these poems. (He has a couple of very good poems about Rhiannon on his channel, too, which are worth looking for.) When I contacted him to buy a copy of the book, he told me that it wasn’t available, but a new edition was on the way. Last week, I was finally able to order one for myself, and what with the vagaries of mail these days, I persuaded him to let me have a digital copy in the meantime, for review purposes. This is a book I really want to share!

The Uffington white horse has now reached the status of international celebrity, and a glance at the artwork here will probably be enough to connect name to shape for most readers. The Uffington Horse is chalk hill figure, cut into the landscape of what is now Oxfordshire some 3,000 years ago. Chalk hill figures must be regularly renewed, by a process known as scouring, or they will simply grass over. The scouring process requires many man hours, so it’s an amazing feat of continuity that the Uffington Horse is still with us, in all her chalky glory, described here in The White Horse Submits to a Scouring.

That scratching
with a gleaming trowel keeps her
on the edge of ecstasy and pain,
and when fresh chalk is hammered
into her pock-marks, it hurts worse
than the reverse of depilation.  

Standing so high, and so large, that she can only really be appreciated as a whole from the opposite side of the valley, or the air, the Uffington horse has inspired the creation of many, more recent, giant horses, which I wrote about in another post. She is also part of a wider landscape of significant ancient monuments, including the Avebury complex, the passage tomb known as Wayland’s Smithy, and several hillforts. All of this contributes to the richness of Giles Watson’s book, which he has illustrated with his own lovely artwork, done mostly in chalk and pastel.

Through the vehicle of fifteen well crafted poems, the reader is taken on a tour of the local area by the horse, herself, who has long been held in local legend to come down from her hill to drink at night. For readers who might feel daunted at the thought of so many strange British monuments, some notes are included at the back of the book, which help to explain things.

I’ve been a fan of Watson’s poetry for awhile, and love the way his viewpoint shifts with the deftness of a finely tuned lens – one moment a telescope, the next a microscope. This is evident in his frequent allusions to the tiny fossils found in the chalk from which the horse is created, as in The White Horse Drinks at the Spring Beneath the Manger.

The White Horse comes gingerly, lest her hooves
be smirched. Chalk mingles with ice crystals. Stars
become lost in snow. When the White Horse drinks,
there is no disturbance – the perfect spurt
is not spattered; there is no spray, no sound of lapping --
just a slow absorption of water into chalk.

The little fossils in the horse’s eyeballs breathe again;
her whole form is a white swarm of animalcules
swimming for their lives.

There is certainly a whimsical aspect to this work, but I almost hesitate to use that phrase for fear of creating the impression that the poems are childish or superficial. This confident opening poem might give you an idea of how much they are not!

The White Horse and the Milky Way

Bored of grass, the White Horse
strays onto the Milky Way.
Trodden stars clag her shoes
like Ridgeway chalk in rain.
Across interstellar voids
she trails their detritus.

Beneath her hooves
nebulae are disturbed.
Asteroids scatter.
Black holes open up.

She startles as night
fades – flashes back
to turf – remembers
she is only chalk.

Whimsy and humour do get their say, though as in The White Horse Hides from Prying Eyes, when the horse risks having her absence from her customary hill spotted on a moonless night.

Even at dark-moon, there is the danger some
human do-gooder will climb up there, find
she has absconded, leaving behind a dusty,
horse-shaped trench. And when she has
scampered off, a mile above the Ridgeway,
making diversions to visit her chalky
friends, she risks being spotted by some
drunken neo-Druid who has staggered
out of the public house at Avebury
for a pee. It has happened once or twice,

But the description in The White Horse High Tails it Over Avebury, combined with Giles Watson’s lovely painting, is one of my favourites, managing to combine the cosmic and the prosaic that is the British landscape with deft strokes

The White Horse knows
there is nowhere like it in the world.
 
Tests of Cidaris give her goosepimples;
there are tremors amongst ancient
corals in her tail. Then there is the church
hanging outside the cursus, like
a satellite, or a menhir from a missing
avenue of stones split by fire
for building houses, and those
modern roads, gouging through
the village, channelling buses
from Swindon to Devizes. And
to think: the whole place was once
an ocean full of Belemnites
who preyed, ate, waned, died,
transmuted to bullets of stone.

The Flight of the White Horse by Giles Watson is available from Lulu, at £10.53.

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Photo by Warren Lilford

Giles Watson was born in Southampton, but emigrated to Australia with his parents at the age of one, and lived there for the next twenty-five years. He returned to live in England between 1995 and 2013, staying in Durham, Buckinghamshire, the Isles of Scilly and Oxfordshire.

Much of his creative work is infused with his own idiosyncratic spirituality: awed by nature, steeped in history, and inspired by a quiet sense of the sacramental.

Giles moved to Albany, Western Australia, in 2013, and published his first Australian collection, Strandings, shortly afterwards.

His most recent collection: A Glister of Leaves, was written during self-isolation during the Covid-19 outbreak, and revisits the megalithic monuments, woodlands and chalk downlands of southern Oxfordshire, recalls encounters with exquisite insects, and celebrates the gifts of solitude and quiet observation.

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