On Lacking the Killer Instinct

THEMES

• Nature

• Death

• Historical wrong

• Isolation

QUOTES

• “One hare…I met when I fled up into the hills, that time/ my father was dying in hospital”

• Borne back/ by the morning paper’s prize photograph:/ two greyhounds tumbling over, absurdly gross,/ while the hare shoots off to the left, her bright eye/ full not only of speed and fear/ but surely in the moment a glad power”

• “Like my father’s running from a lorry-load of soldiers/ in nineteen twenty-one, nineteen years old, never/ such gladness”

• “The hare/ like him should never have been coursed,”

• “but clever, she gets off”

• “The lorry was growling/ and he was clever”

• “He saw a house/ and risked an open kitchen door”

• “The soldiers found six people in a country kitchen, one/ drying his face, dazed-looking, the towel/ half covering his face”

• “The people let him sleep there”

• “And I should not/ have run away, but I went back to the city/ next morning, washed in brown bog water, and/ I thought about the hare, in her hour of ease.”