Meet the Poems: The Starlings

Published in Happy Hour (Gallery Press, 2012), here Andrew reflects on how and why he wrote this poem.

The Starlings

Everything, relatively speaking,

is simple: a tree a tree, the sky the sky,

the clock on the wall the clock on the wall,

a tick a tick, a tock a tock, time time.

And then come the starlings, tearing about,

beautiful obliterations of the commonplace,

going through the motions

of their unchoreographed airshow,

tremendously alike,

tremendously alone.

Background

This poem is from my first collection Happy Hour and at ten lines is one of my shorter poems. First published in Ulster Tatler’s ‘Literary Miscellany’ in 2010 it’s a poem that I always read at events. While it’s only ten lines I feel like it’s probably a poem which captures a lot of the themes I keep going back to: the passing of time; and the tension between wanting to be solitary and wanting to belong. 

When did you write it?

When I wrote the poem I was living at home with my parents in Crossgar, Northern Ireland, and can remember the afternoon in which I wrote it quite clearly. At that time, I worked in the kitchens of a hospital in Downpatrick, where I’d spend the days either washing dishes, floors, or vacuum packing frozen meals - halcyon days, indeed. Jokes aside, there was something simple to this lifestyle - I got up; I did my work; I came home and left my work at the hospital. There were no emails to attend to, no planning or impending decisions to be made. My shifts started at 7.30am and finished at 2pm, meaning that I had the rest of the day to myself. It was a period of time in which I was between things - I’d finished my Masters at St Andrews, and was due to take up a place on a teacher training programme in the summer, some six or eight months away. So, it was a time in which I got a good bit of writing done. 

I remember the afternoon this poem came to me being very similar to very many other afternoons I’d ever had in Northern Ireland: overcast, drab and pretty non-descript. I was in the kitchen at the time, and looked out and there they were. 

What is the poem about? 

It can very much be filed under ‘lyric moment’ or ‘extraordinary in the ordinary’. As for the influences of the poem, in my early days as a writer I was obsessed with trying to sound as conversational, or natural as possible while still pertaining to some poetic style or language. This balance, as I was to find out, was harder to strike than I thought. Writers like Paul Muldoon and Robert Frost loom large behind this poem. 

The opening line with the clause of ‘relatively speaking’ which then moves on to the enjambed ‘is simple’ was my attempt to write in this poetically casual way. We’ve then got the repetitions, and then the starlings themselves. 

The reason I wrote this in couplets? 

I wrote this in couplets because I liked the space it opened up on the page and felt that otherwise ten lines compressed on the page wouldn’t have conveyed the sense of flight - in the literal sense of the starlings flying, but also time’s flight. 

The ending?

I suppose this is quite a simple ending to what is a simple poem. I liked the similarity and the difference in ‘alike’ and ‘alone’ - both beginning with ‘al’ but ending slightly differently. The image of the words themselves came to mimic the meaning of the phrase they carried. 

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