“as if someone had punched it, hard, from within”
Line 8 (page 19), as the first box is opened
The hawk is heard before she is seen, and the simile gives her the force of a human fist. The commas around “hard” isolate the word so that the reader feels the blow land, and the sentence ends on “from within”. The literal meaning is plain: a powerful bird is trapped in a box. But a reading worth making is that the box works like Macdonald herself, calm on the outside, with something violent pushing to get out.
“everything is brilliance and fury”
Line 17 (page 19), the moment the hawk is pulled out
This comes at the end of one long, breathless sentence, and it is in the present tense: from line 15 Macdonald stops remembering the moment and relives it. The two abstract nouns fuse light and violence. Brilliance is the sunlight that floods the quayside at that instant; fury is the hawk’s struggle. The word “everything” matters too: there is no calm observer left outside the moment, only total experience.
“She is a conjuring trick. A reptile. A fallen angel.”
Lines 20-21 (page 19)
Three metaphors in three sentences, and each one contradicts the last: an illusion, a cold-blooded ancient creature, a being cast down from heaven. The list goes on for several more fragments. The effect is of language failing: no single image can hold the hawk, so Macdonald throws one after another. The fallen angel is the richest, because it makes the hawk beautiful and damned at once, holy and dangerous, and it hints that Macdonald is drawn to something that is not wholly safe.
“like a turkey in a butcher’s shop”
Line 24 (page 19), the hawk hanging from her jesses
Straight after gold and angels, this simile is deliberately ugly: a dead bird hung head-down for sale. It is bathos, a sudden drop from the sublime to the ordinary, and it is honest about what the moment actually looked like. It also brings death into the scene. One reading is that death is never far from the mind of a writer who has recently lost her father; another is that Macdonald refuses to prettify the hawk. Both show a writer who will not settle for one tone.
“All at once I loved this man, and fiercely.”
Lines 39-40 (page 19)
The emotion is sudden and out of proportion: this is a stranger conducting a sale. The adverb “fiercely” is held back to the end of the sentence by a comma, and it is a word we would more readily use of the hawk, as if, in one reading, her wildness has passed into Macdonald. The love follows directly from the account of him feeding the chick with tweezers. It is a reasonable reading that a grieving daughter is moved, without quite saying so, by a picture of patient, protective care.
“This was not my hawk.”
Lines 46-47 (page 20)
A short, flat declarative sentence after the long, excited paragraphs, and a complete reversal: the bird she has just fallen for belongs to someone else. The phrase “my hawk” then becomes the refrain of the second half. Here it is plain fact, read off the paperwork in ordinary type; later, in the anthology’s italics, it becomes the voice in her head. The gap between what the forms say and what she feels drives everything that follows.
“a sort of madwoman in the attack”
Line 51 (page 20), the second hawk leaving her box
A pun on the madwoman in the attic, Bertha Mason, the wife kept locked away in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, set up by the comparison with a Victorian melodrama. It is comic and literary, and the hedge “a sort of” shows Macdonald half mocking her own reaction. But it is also a gendered image of female madness and confinement, and at the end Macdonald arguably casts herself in a similar role. The hawk she rejects is, in one reading, a mirror she does not want to look into.
“a seaside production of Medea”
Line 68 (page 20), in the final paragraph
Macdonald sees herself through the breeder’s eyes: a desperate woman, hands outstretched, playing tragedy. Medea is the heroine of Euripides’ Greek tragedy, a woman whose grief and rage at betrayal drive her to terrible revenge. Placing that tragedy in a seaside production makes it small, amateur and absurd. The bathos is self-mocking, but the choice of Medea is revealing: an image of overwhelming, dangerous emotion, which is exactly what the extract has avoided naming.