Hymsee Mee Speyr

Composer: Matthew Warren

Words: Annie Kissack

Performance: The Tallis Consort

Annie Kissack is one of the chief proponents of Manx language poetry and here evokes sheer wonder at the solitary experience of the natural world. The enchantment of gathering so much that can’t be gathered first drew me to this poem, with its repeated ‘Hymsee mee’ returning again and again like a Kyrie eleison. When I imagine the speaker in the poem, it is with the engrossed aimlessness of Casper David’s Wanderer Above the Sea Fog, only to remember the simple aim amongst all of the awe—to gather blackberries.

In this setting of the text, the range of the imagery, from expansive skies to tangled thickets of the poem’s titular blackberries are explored in the dense choral textures. The voices flit between dense chordal harmony and skittish echoes of one another that all hang on the strong melodic identity attached to the word ‘Hymsee’.