Skip to content

Scottish Poetry Library

Register/Sign in
Shopping Bag Shopping Bag
Bringing people and poems together
  • Home
  • Poetry
    • Poets
    • Poems
    • Film
    • Makar – National Poet
      • Our Waking Breath: A Poem-letter from Scotland to Ukraine
      • A Woman’s A Woman
      • The story of the Makar – National Poet of Scotland
    • Best Scottish Poems
    • Poetry Ambassadors
      Tosgairean na Bàrdachd
      • Poetry Commissions: Walter Scott 250
        Coimiseanan Bàrdachd: Walter Scott 250
      • Poetry Ambassadors 2021
    • Podcasts
  • Library
    • Become a borrower
    • Catalogue
    • Collections
    • Ask a librarian
    • Copyright enquiries
  • Learning
    • SQA set texts
    • Learning resources
    • Designing sensory poetry activities
    • Children’s poems in Scots
    • National Poetry Day archive
    • New to poetry?
    • Advice for poets
  • Events
    • What’s On
    • Meeting rooms and venue hire
    • Exhibitions
  • Shop
    • Poetry Highlights
    • Entropie Books
    • Stichill Marigold Press
    • Poems for Doctors, Nurses & Teachers
    • Scottish Poetry
    • Poetry Pamphlet Cards
    • Help
  • About us
    • Our story
    • Our people
    • Company Papers & Policies
    • Our projects
    • Our building
    • FAQs
    • Find us
  • Support us
    • Become a Friend
    • Donate
  • Blog
Shopping BagShopping Bag
Ask a librarian
  • Home
  • >
  • Poetry
  • >
  • Tom Pow
  • >
  • Spanish Shaving
Donate Donate icon Ask a Librarian Ask a Librarian icon

Spanish Shaving

Tom Pow

As light dims, I take my shaver outside
to trim my holiday beard. The grey drifts
down to tinder-dry grasses; the small blades
chirr like insects as my blind hand sifts

through the stubble. That’s when my wife appears
and sees at once something else we can share.
In tending each wanton bristle, she blanks
out all but the job at hand. A car roars

through the vineyards; a dog barks. The leaves
rattle in the almost breeze, while I lean
forward like an old man in surrender.
There was stubble behind his blue jaw-line

my father always missed. His late kisses
exposed it when, trusting in her answer,
he tipped his face towards my mother. His mask
briefly hovers in the warm evening air.

Between my face and it, my wife’s sweet breath
travels the blind trajectory of love.


Tom Pow

from In The Becoming – New and Selected Poems (Edinburgh: Polygon, 2009)

Reproduced by permission of the publisher.

Tags:

21st century poems Best Scottish Poems 2009 scottish poems

About this poem

This poem was included in Best Scottish Poems 2009. Best Scottish Poems is an online publication, consisting of 20 poems chosen by a different editor each year, with comments by the editor and poets. It provides a personal overview of a year of Scottish poetry. The editor in 2009 was Andrew Greig.

Editor’s comment:
Fine poems celebrating the loyalty and endurance of married love are not common. The pitfalls – smugness, sentimentality, embarrassment – are evident. But not here. The scene is simple; the mutual moment underscored by memory and mortality – and what else is marriage? The poem’s form, its subtle and shifting partial rhymes, help ward off any self-indulgence. The poem feels at once natural and made, as it should.

Author’s note:
I wrote Spanish Shaving after the publication of Landscapes and Legacies (2003). Clearly it had no place in my next full collection, Dear Alice – Narratives of Madness (2008), so it had to wait till 2009 to be included as one of the new poems in my In The Becoming – New and Selected Poems. I feel it sits well in this context, as the general themes of the New Poems are love, death and the sweetness of life. The closing lines of ‘The Walnut Gatherers’, which precedes it, are:

Per il dolce. How right on such a day
to make time for sweetness: to mark presence,

sunlight, silence, with the rhythmic
click of walnut on walnut.

I think the narrative of Spanish Shaving is very clear. I am shaving, blindly, outside, when my wife decides to help me. It becomes a ritual that enforces submission and reflection on times past and times to come. I wanted both that intimacy, but also the sense of figures in a landscape – the soft, falling half-rhymes of evening.

Share this
Facebook
Twitter
Email

Learn more

Best Scottish Poems 2009

edited by Andrew Greig
Find out more

Tom Powb.1950

Tom Pow is a poet with a dozen collections to his name, and has also written for children and young adults. Travel and the exploration of peripheral regions feature in his more recent projects and poetry.
More about Tom Pow

Newsletter

Sign up for our regular email newsletter.
Subscribe now
  • Newsletter signup
  • Accessibility
  • Terms & Conditions
  • Privacy Policy
Scottish Poetry Library
5 Crichton's Close, Canongate
Edinburgh EH8 8DT
Tel: +44 (0)131 557 2876
© Scottish Poetry Library 2022.
The Scottish Poetry Library is a registered charity (No. SCO23311).
City of Edinburgh logo Green Arts Initiative logo Creative Scotland logo
Scottish Poetry Library