The speaker is speculating on what to call this particular day of the year, a day that comes after a day that is after the largest Christian holiday of the year, but decides he does not know what to call it. This placement of the action, on a day that is almost significant, but is not at all, speaks about the relationship between the father and the son that is explored.

Similarly to the farrier, we have man altering the body of an animal for his own purpose – in lambs, castration occurs to increase their size and improve their taste. Man’s interaction with nature in this collection is always almost entirely self-serving. The farrier is an archetypal masculine, manual labouring figure, creating a contrast with those we see in the industries of service and entertainment later on in the collection (see ‘Services’ or ‘L.A. Evening’. The fact that he is smoking a roll-up suggests an extension of the values of working with hands as well as a rejection of modern innovation and the ubiquitous health warnings on the dangers of smoking; in ‘Wake’ we see a man dying of lung-cancer, as if to create a book-end to this disregard. There is nothing modern about his attire or his physical appearance, the sideburns for example. It is highly conventional for modern poets to begin their collections with an epilogue – T.S. Eliot did this all the time. There are a number of reasons for doing this. Firstly, by linking to a famous, established piece of writing from the past, the poet is showing that they are fitting their work into ‘the poetic tradition’ and that their work is fit to sit next to the canon. Sheers has also written for radio, television and newspapers, and has toured extensively. In 2004 he was Writer in Residence at The Wordsworth Trust and was selected as one of the Poetry Book Society’s 20 'Next Generation' Poets. Owen’s second collection of poetry, Skirrid Hill (2005), won a Somerset Maugham Award. Unicorns, almost, his one-man play based on the life and poetry of the World War II poet Keith Douglas, was produced by Old Vic New Voices in 2006, with Joseph Fiennes in the lead role.The title of the poem, ‘Farther’, is a play on the word “father” and is about the distance that the two men have to go to resolve all of their problems. Sheers combines the intersection of the ideas of moment and family within this reference. This poem documents the movement over a distance, the two men scaling the hill. Yet, it is one that also explores the connection between father and son. Therefore, by choosing a title that allows for these connotations to spring forth from one word, Sheers effectively summarises the major themes of the poem under one umbrella reference. It is of some significance that this is occurring in August, yet the previous poem was Winter… a subtle device for showing the passage of time. Also perhaps the suggestion that in the colder months we are motivated by romance, whereas the warmer times of the year are more carnal and lust-fuelled if we are to take on board the image of a ‘mating season’. What I mean by this is that Sheers could be accused, in making this link, of suggesting that women’s ‘magic’ is the bewitching effect of making themselves look more beautiful than they are, yet male ‘magic’ is in practical, useful things, such as harvesting eggs.

Owen Sheers was born in Fiji and brought up in South Wales. He has won prizes for his poetry since 1999 and is considered one of Britain’s most talented young poets. In 2014 he presented a poetry series on the BBC. This poem belongs to the collection, Skirrid Hill For their walk, they have chosen “the long way round,/ through the wood, simplified by snow.” They have not chosen the easy path, nothing is straightforward. They have a long way to go, just as their relationship does, and the only simple part is the snow that makes the ground a single color (but it also is another danger on the walk). This is clearly a link with Seamus Heaney’s poem ‘digging’ in which the poet likens his pen to a spade.Sheers is presenting this as the turning point where he has become the man of the family and his father is the weaker one – although ‘Inheritance’ gives us the depiction of the father as quite a weak figure from the start. In this poem, there is a turning point when the poet says ‘ I felt the tipping of the scales of us, / the intersection of our ages’. Sheers has become ‘the man of the family’ and his father is the frail one . Sheers compounds the comparison of this place with Mametz Wood, when he describes his friend’s passed father as ‘a poppy sown in the unripe corn’. The clear semantic links between poppies and the First World War, along with the car-names being described as the ‘names of the dead’ give us the sense that the War is an unshakeable image for Sheers and its effect on Wales extends far beyond the Somme. It also heightens the tension between man and nature as being almost warlike – the ongoing battle between the two is a key theme here.