High places

It is a tiny poem, but there are plate tectonics at work. The poem describes a mountainous landscape beyond human reach, so remote that it resists even the human compulsion to conquer it on the map. Here the “High Places” are also the unknowable regions of the human phyche - places beyond the reaches of our understanding, “slick escarpments” that resist exploration. Every stressed word is like an ice ax, trying to gain purchase, while the alliterated “sh” - “sharp shapes, glacier -/scraped faces” enacts the horrible sound of an object sliding down the sheer ice. Yet it would be a mistake to see the poem only as an evocation of the struggling mind. The images are too powerful not to have some material reality. The poem itself is an invitation to those high places, the low oxygen atmosphere above our understanding. To accept the invitation and really enter the poem is to make a demanding ascent, but a thrilling one too.

~ Extract from “Newsweek”