Samuel Tongue

I sit and watch the light degrade in his eyes.

He tries and fails to climb to his chair, shirks in one corner of the kitchen, cowed, denatured, ceasing to be anything like a cat.

And there's a new look in those eyes that refuse to meet mine, and it's the shame of being found out.

Just that.

And with that loss of face, his face, I see, has turned human.

This was the poem that we opened the discussion group with, and it is grim.

The word grim is in the first stanza there, and it's had quite an emotional impact on quite a lot of the people in the group, not least because quite a lot of us have had our own cats, we've had our own

aged cats and this study of a cat denatured and cowed and ceasing to be yeah had a lot of resonance with everybody as we read it and reread it we kind of picked apart at those seams and tried to work out why it was having such an impact on us

One of the ways in which Robin Robertson's poetry works in many other different poems as well as this one is to really build our detail upon detail, really kind of concrete studies, really focused studies of the animal at hand or even the emotion at hand.

A lot of his poems are very, very visceral in the kind of real sense of that word.

They go into the blood and guts of things.

And here there's a very kind of unsentimental attitude to what is being pictured and imagined here.

But as you say, with the detail that builds upon the images that build upon one another,

It's split into two stanzas.

The first stanza is all of these kind of concrete images that build up to introducing the cat.

A figment, a thumbed maquette of a cat, some ditched plaything, something brought in from outside.

And then things like the muzzle of perished rubber, one ear eaten away, a sour body lumped like a beanbag.

And they just follow on from one another and build up this image of this animal that is just so degraded and such a sad, sad creature.

But of course, as the poem continues, we get a sense of the idea that this was a companion.

This is a companion to the perceiver of the poem, the person who says that I study and I sit and watch the light degrade in his eyes.