Summary
In the poem "Heron at Port Talbot," the speaker describes the steelworks at Port Talbot and how, while driving nearby, she almost crashes into a heron. The first stanza introduces the setting with snow falling on cooling towers supported by cranes. The steelwork's machines have "old bones" that whiten as they age (3). Death arrives for these machines in the form of rust and erosions.
The highway runs close to the sea at "the dock's edge" (6). The coastal location brings the possibility of strong onshore winds. The speaker tightens her hands on her wheel as she drives against the "white steel" (snow and/or pollution) in these winds (8). In the third stanza, the speaker nearly collides with the heron. They both interrupt the path of their flight, turning to avoid colliding outright. In this near miss that could have been fatal, the speaker feels a sense of intimacy with the bird.
The speaker compares the pollution from the steelworks to billowing dirty laundry that settles over everything. Emissions from the steelwork's fires stain the sky, and other physical byproducts remain both in the sky and beneath the snow.
In the sixth stanza, the speaker calls the heron a "surveyor" and an "archangel" who navigates the landscape between the steelwork towers and the mountains (21 and 23). According to the speaker, this bird has come to establish an aerial highway for its kind. The heron and the speaker meet at an "inter-section" of interruption and encounter (25). Onshore winds affect both the snowfall and the beating hearts of all living creatures, including the speaker and the bird.
Analysis
When a human speaker encounters a heron at Port Talbot steelworks in the poem "Heron at Port Talbot," Clarke uses figurative language to layer this encounter with the collision between nature and industry. The poem was originally published in Clarke's 1982 collection Letter From a Far Country. On Clarke's website, she recounts having actually experienced this near-collision, which inspired her to write about such a moment of intimacy and danger. The poem takes place in the Welsh town and community of Port Talbot and particularly focuses on the area's natural landscape and human-created steel mill. The speaker introduces this setting in the first stanza with snow falling on the mill's towers. Snow indicates winter, a time that can symbolize death and closure, but also the dormancy necessary for rebirth. The sibilance in the first two lines creates a sense of calm softness. Death permeates not just the landscape but also the machines: the towers are "cooling" as though the fires needed to make steel are no longer being stoked (1).
Clarke blurs the distinction between industry and the natural world in various ways. For example, the word "cranes" refers both to a type of construction equipment and a species of bird (2). The machines also have whitening "old bones," giving them an animalistic quality (3). Bones are a structural and endocrine organ; they are living tissue that protects soft organs and assists with movement. The use of the word "bones" implies that the remnants of the steel mill were once alive. In the poem's present day, perhaps the mill is nonfunctional for the winter or faces more permanent closure. In either case, Clarke portrays death as a gentle and organic process, whether it applies to the winter landscape or to the mill's machinery. The snow "delicately [settles]" on cranes while death "settles with its rusts, its erosions" (2 and 4). The word "settle" repeats but in different tenses, with the snow settling in a continuous but temporary manner while death settles in a more permanent way.
The second stanza brings "warnings of wind off the sea," introducing a new aspect of the landscape (5). The alliteration of /w/ creates a melodious effect. The entire poem is written in free verse with varied meter, but the use of alliteration, occasional rhyme, and general pattern of eight to ten syllables per line generate a natural rhythm. Alliteration occurs again in the sixth line when the highway "dips to the dock's edge," and the short /i/ in "dips" parallels the word "wind" from the previous line. Critics have noted that Clarke frequently employs techniques such as alliteration, assonance, and rhyme in her writing. In the case of "Heron at Port Talbot," these literary techniques help layer elements of nature (such as the wind) with human-created structures (such as steelwork machinery and motorways).
Again, Clarke blends natural and industrial imagery through rhyme and alliteration in the lines, "My hands tighten on the wheel against / the white steel of the wind" (7-8). The /w/ repeats in "wheel," "white," and "wind," echoing aeolian sound. This sound evokes melancholic feelings of longing. Clarke pairs this alliteration with the rhyme between "wheel" and "steel," which energizes the lines with a sense of movement as the speaker drives against an onshore wind (7-8). The word "steel" connects back to the Port Talbot Steelworks, and also touches on the association between this word and strength.
In the third stanza, the speaker nearly collides with the flying heron. The two "[brake] flight," and the word "braking" as used in this line could be heard as a homonym for "breaking" (9). The "shocking / intimacy of near-collision" that occurs in this moment is recounted with both softness (such as in the line, "we almost touch") and urgency ("near-collision") (10-11). The former is also conveyed in the metaphor "animal tracks that cross in snow" because tracks are a remnant of past movement, not an actual encounter between two animals (12). Here, Clarke complicates the poem's sense of time. Remnants such as tracks and bones are signs of earlier life, but they actively confront living beings in the poem's present.
In iambic pentameter, the speaker states that she witnesses the heron's eye and change of mind during their near-collision in the fourth stanza. The exact use of this meter imparts a sense of clarity, which reflects the way that during a stressful situation, some people experience time slowing down enough for them to observe minute details. The speaker recognizes that she and the bird "might have died / in some terrible conjunction" (15-16). A conjunction is the instance of two or more events or things occurring at the same point in time or space. This gestures toward the potential danger that lurks in the meeting place between humans (and the industries that they create) and nature.
After exploring the inherent risks in humans encountering other parts of the natural world, Clarke immediately brings the focus back to industrial pollution in the fifth stanza. She uses a simile to compare "steel town’s sulphurs" to billowing "dirty washing" (17-18). Airing dirty laundry in public is an idiom that refers to when someone shares private and distasteful information in contexts where they should not. Here, humans air their dirty laundry to the rest of the world in the form of pollution. Again, Clarke uses the word "steel" to refer both to the alloy manufactured at Port Talbot Steelworks and to the notion of strength when she writes, "The sky stains / with steely inks and fires" (18-19). In other words, pollution leaves a mark that is extremely difficult to remove.
The heron enters the picture as "a surveyor" whose job is to inspect the landscape (21). Again, Clarke inserts a double meaning into her language so as to speak about nature while referencing industry, and vice versa. Industrial surveyors make precise measurements to determine property boundaries. This is exactly what the heron does except that he does so on behalf of his kind rather than for human fabrication. The word "archangel" suggests a divine purpose as this bird comes to "re-open the heron roads" (23-24). Just as humans drive on motorways, herons navigate aerial roads. In the poem, the speaker and the heron meet at the "inter-section" of their worlds (25). Strong onshore winds blow into this encounter as a disruptive force. This inter-section is not a place with concrete and separated forms. Rather, blurred boundaries allow matter to shift, and things take on the quality of other things. This is why Clarke layers nature with industry through language in this poem. The "broken rhythms of blood" might refer to the speaker's and the heron's irregular heartbeats after their near-collision. Though the reader only has access to the speaker's perspective, it is possible to assume that both the speaker and the heron were changed by their encounter.
