Hi, I find this poem a bit cryptic and I'd appreciate any interpretations. It's from the collection Tyrannosaurus Rex versus The Corduroy Kid. The poem can be read online
here
I think it's a comment on celebrity and media culture. I think it's about a celebrity that flees a media scandal, only to find his hideout is full of expat Brits clamouring to read The Daily Mail.
Explanatory point: The Daily Mail is a British tabloid newspaper whose editorial slant is small-c conservative, anti-liberal, anti-immigration, pro-life, pro-capitalism, pro 'traditional values'. Its readership is often satirized in the media as being narrow minded, racist, prejudiced or generally intolerant. It has the second largest (!) circulation in the UK.
1st stanza: Guy unconscious on a beach at noon. Wakes but can't be bothered to move. We suspect their might be something wrong with him.
2nd stanza: The donkeys are "refugees or latter day saints". This could be just a straight description of donkeys on the beach, but I think there is something else. I think there is an implication that the guy has endured suffering or persecution. Is "Wax-coated needles wouldn't sink" just part of setting the scene along the beach or is it also a metaphor for a scandal he was in which refuses to go away? 'Loose Talk.' is deliberately placed at the end of the second stanza because it refers to gossip that caused the protagonist to flee abroad. When he gets there he finds...
3rd stanza...that the local expat community are already swarming around the piles of Daily Mail not even out of their plastic yet, eager to find out about the scandal he was involved in. I'm not sure the country is significant. Spain is plausible as it is a common landing ground for, (according to the poet) Daily-Mail reading (ouch!), retired British expats. It was, maybe still is, considered a bolthole for criminals on the run (and runaway celebrities?). cf the multi-talented Stephen Fry who, ill & depressed, fled to America to walk up and down a beach
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/20...h.broadcasting
I think it is significant that the guy is abroad, somewhere warm (to defrost) where, ironically, he finds stereotypically narrow minded people from the country he has just fled who have nothing better to do than gossip about the latest celebrity scandal.
Noon is now evening. The guy is still on or around the beach. The sea is non-tidal so, building on the Spain idea, perhaps it's the Mediterranean. The ships are fishing boats or more likely large, modern, luxury power boats belonging to the wealthy expats. The man is not in his right mind. He is probably suffering from stress, anxiety, depression and a persecution complex. To him, with their modern, spiky hard edges silhouetted at night the pleasure boats resemble, ironically again, persecuting ships of war
4th stanza: The guy is the frozen chicken of the subject. He is numbed to ice by what's happened to him. Frozen chicken suggests vulnerability, cowardice (in running away?), rawness, something that's been plucked, that's about to be eaten, something farmed (celebrity culture) for consumption? He cannot be thawed by the setting, rust coloured sun at dusk because there's not enough warmth in it. Just as his mind distorts how he sees the boats, it also makes him see the setting sun as a rusty, blunt nail that can't help him. But why wasn't he thawed by the noon sun? Did that just numb him unconscious with its heat? Why is there an enjambement (is that the correct term when the phrase runs from one stanza to the next as opposed to from one line to the next?) between stanza 3 and "The sun's nail" and stanza 4: "by dusk - rusty, blunt - useless against ice."? I've got no idea what the last line about. Was it a all a dream? What is eating the sleep about?
Am I in fact completely off track?
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Note: Felicity, I've edited this to fix the broken link --Alex