Samuel Tongue

are linked by this physical loss.

And that's the way of it.

In a way, and we'll see this in the second poem as well, Robin Robertson's work often examines this kind of pattern of loss and animalistic creatureliness, which humans don't get to be outside of.

And I think that's important to think about in terms of his poetics.

Yeah, you don't get to be outside of the situation.

You're inside of it.

And whether that's the cat kind of failing, which hints at human failure and the human creatureliness of that failure, or it's in the kind of love poem that we'll have a look at in a minute.

There's no escape in that sense.

Not fatalistic, but quite claustrophobic.

And yeah, those poems will echo towards one another.

I said that this was two stanzas, this poem.

It's important that both stanzas are almost like mini sonnets in themselves.

So there's 14 lines in both, both stanzas, so it's 28 lines.

So on the face of it, they're very balanced across one another.

On the page, it seems quite balanced.

But in the second stanza, everything really slows down.

And starts bringing in those big themes of shame and loss of face and this, as I say, this metamorphosis of the cat into the human and the human into the cat and that kind of blurring of the face and of our vision.

So it wasn't the happiest, chirpiest poem to begin our discussions with, but an important one.

And I think a way of thinking into and hearing and listening and tuning into Robin Robertson's kind of stylistic of how he uses image and not even metaphor really, just building up of image and really detailed and really significant imagery to say what he wants to say.

The second poem we looked at was a more straightforward sonnet in the sense that, and when I say straightforward, I mean much more that it's kind of classical.