Spare a thought

With just one new release on everyone’s minds, we’ve switched from our usual format to bring a round-up of reviews of Prince Harry’s controversial memoir.

Baboons

These apes yawn under heat and dry canopy.

Their day has been trying, beset by apathy

And punctuated by a vegetarian meal –That for an omnivore has a limited appeal. Now what would you do plagued by sun, flea and predator?

Rise, no doubt, in elevation to inspect the repertoire, Consort amongst others about a threatening baboon

Or look for inspiration into a lifting moon. Do they consider their meandering enterprise, Some distant landscape that will mesmerise

Those of a thinking personality –All well-scared and programmed into reality?

Certainly they are all this and more, But now a rest will cure A little insouciance or whatever That, over time, has made them clever. Yes, the baboons are survivors, One of mammalogy’s obvious drivers, Making them wander and seek into the night

‘This must be the strangest book ever written by a royal,” said the BBC’s Sean Coughlan, describing the book as “part confession, part rant and part love letter”.

In places it feels like the longest angry drunk text ever sent. … It’s disarmingly frank and intimate - showing the sheer weirdness of his often isolated life. And it’s the small details, rather than the set-piece moments, that give a glimpse of how little we really knew.

What’s missing, in his opinion, is “any sense of awareness of any wider context … It’s as if he has been blinded by the paparazzi flashlights.”

The Guardian’s Rachel Cooke thinks Harry is “petulant: a man who thinks nothing, even now, of complaining about the bedroom he was allotted for his summer hols in Granny’s castle.” She doesn’t hide her contempt:

What kind of person insists on an airclearing meeting with their father on the day of his father’s funeral? A myopic, self-obsessed, non-empathic kind of person, I would say. Exactly the same kind of person, in fact, who would talk about reconciliation in the same breath as they publicly slag off their family.

The Independent’s reviewer, Lucy Pavia, enjoyed the book.

It’s richly detailed and at times beautifully written; if Harry is going to set fire to his family, he has at least done it with style.

And she has something insightful to say about Meghan Markle:

She is not just the new love of his life but his emotional life raft, one he fears the press is intent on sinking … The panic of losing her inflates between every line like a balloon.

Have YOU read Spare? What did you think? We’d love to hear your opinions, and we’ll print the most interesting in our next issue.

Email editorial@shiremagazine.co.uk

Until your perceptions are far out of sight. Then came the day to traverse the savannah, Savouring the view, hooting a holy hosannah!

Discovering compass, press and powder, And the will to demonstrate louder.

Norman Marshall

The Plastic Bottle

A plastic bottle

Bobbing on the sea

An incredible place

Where no bottles should be.

The sea belongs

To fish and eels

To crabs and lobsters

And corals and seals.

The bottle was tossed

And rolled down a wave

Until coming to rest

At the mouth of a cave.

And there it lay

Wrapped up in a net

Left by fishermen

For the birds to get.

Tangled in a web

Of ropes and rags

Of bottle tops

And plastic bags.

But the bottle was stuck

And try as it might It would be there forever In its terrible plight.

Until a group Of passersby

Exclaimed in dismay

Oh why! Oh why

Do people leave

Their rubbish behind On the beach and the rocks

For others to find?

The plastic destroys

The life of the sea

Where plants and fish

The Forest (Coed-y-Brenin)

I love this forest with its many themes

– those of the tumbling waterfall, that sings

– of mountain heights, where rise fresh water springs;

– of roaring rivers, born of gentle streams…

Just now a man pans there for gold that gleams amongst the grit and rocks the torrent brings

– I wonder, to what fantasies he clings?

– and what great fortunes figure in his dreams?

But I’m not here to wade and look for gold:

– it’s privilege enough to walk these trails:

– what better way my tensions to release?

The beauties of this forest are untold:

– some say, the finest scenery in Wales;

– here: what I love the most, a sense of peace.

Michael Burns

Should swim and be free.

They picked up the bottle

And gathered the mass

Of ropes and nets

And broken glass.

They searched the caves

And combed the shore

Examined the pools

And found lots more.

Scrambling across

The cli s and the rocks

They left the rubbish

In a recycling box.

Linda Lunn

We want your poems!

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