Reviews and Features
Helen Mort Re-weaving the Rainbow
JO SHAPCOTT
Of Mutability
Faber £12.99
PATRICK McGUINNESS
Jilted City
Carcanet £9.95
PASCALE PETIT
What the Water Gave Me
Seren £8.99
‘Don’t trouble, though, to head anywhere but the sky’. So concludes the title poem of Jo Shapcott’s new collection Of Mutability. With a nod to the racing skies of Shelley’s famous ‘Mutability’ (‘We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon’), Shapcott treats the sky as its own, shifting landscape. This is a collection where:
The sky’s so big
you’d like to trace
God’s design in the palm
of your hand for safety.
(‘Border Cartography’)
The sky has long been a canvas for artists, a site of discovery for scientists and, at times, a battleground between the two. In his book Unweaving the Rainbow (1999), geneticist Richard Dawkins is preoccupied with the fraught relationship between science and human imagination. Citing Keats, who in ‘Lamia’ implied that Newtonian science destroyed the poetry of the rainbow by explaining the origins of its colours, Dawkins seeks to prove that, on the contrary, ‘science is, or ought to be, the inspiration for great poetry’. It is difficult to imagine Dawkins objecting to Shapcott’s treatment of the scientific in Of Mutability. Even the title of the book suggests old scientific texts – it resonates with the authority of On The Origin of the Species, though the distinction between ‘of’ and ‘on’ is a crucial one. The poet is not just an authority on her subject, but a crucial part of it, a product of metamorphosis. Shapcott deals with all the facets of change suggested by her richly suggestive title. Sometimes the transformation is in the narrator, (‘All Flesh Is’ imagines becoming glass). Sometimes it is willed upon the audience:
Reader, you’re an owl
for this moment, your flower-
face a white scrawl
in the dark, a feather frill.
(‘Night Flight From Muncaster’)
This collection shows the world in acute detail. Cells are a recurring motif, as is hair, the subject of the beautifully constructed ‘Riddle’: ‘I smell of every room / you ever walked through’. Hair in Shapcott’s work seems to signify sensitivity and alertness. In ‘Hairless’, she muses, ‘Can the bald lie?’. Hair often stands on end, or senses the atmosphere. It suggests a poetry of the everyday, but one that is wholly in tune with the natural world. ‘Procedure’, a delicate account of recovery from the ‘cellular madness’ of what we assume is cancer, is a celebration of the small and finite, a ‘thank you thank you thank you for the then, and now’ prompted by a cup of tea.
Much as Shapcott’s poetry is rich in scientific understanding (this collection deftly draws its metaphors from gravity, disease, mutation), she is also acutely aware of the boundary between human beings and nature. She catalogues her reasons for striking a scorpion to death with a shoe and concludes, hauntingly: ‘I kill it because it will not speak to me’ (‘Scorpion’). Of Mutability sees Shapcott enter trees, other bodies, water. In ‘Era’, a poem set during the allied invasion of Iraq, she bids farewell to the outside of her own body. In ‘I Go Inside The Tree’, she is capable of ‘tasting / weather in the tree rings’. Yet she still remains separate from the world she studies so religiously. ‘The Blank Page’ is a curious, short poem about being swallowed by the ‘rectangular mouth’ of ink, and seems to act as a symbol of not understanding; it’s almost a curse, Shapcott suggests, to be so acutely aware, to have the hairs on your neck constantly raised by the world.
One wonders what Dawkins would make of Shapcott’s sense of the gap between what we can observe and what we intuitively know and feel; in ‘Shapcott’s Variation on Schoenberg’s Orchestration of Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in E♭flat major, “St Anne”’, she describes it as a ‘passion for layers’. In Unweaving The Rainbow, Dawkins is quick to dismiss Hamlet’s notion that ‘there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in your philosophy’, and attacks astrology, superstition and other examples of ‘bad poetic science’. Whilst he thinks that mysteries are only problems waiting to be understood, he still believes that it’s possible to retain a ‘poetic sense of wonder’ even as we see the world with rational clarity. Dawkins cannot dismiss the role of metaphor and mystery in language as a means of enriching our understanding of that vast, exciting world. This is the true alchemy of Shapcott’s verse: the real mutability at stake in her collection is the problem of turning a scientist’s keen observational eye into the poet’s lyrical gift for inspiring awe through language.
Patrick McGuinness is another poet who alerts us to the gap between what we observe and what we experience in his second collection, Jilted City. His narrators ache for the subliminal world: for ‘stations where the train doesn’t stop’ (‘Blue Guide’), for ‘things that took time from us and gave nothing back’(‘Lists’). ‘Déja Vu’, a slight, wistful poem that cleverly appears twice in the collection, captures his yearning for another world running parallel to ours:
Two tenses grappling with one instant, one perception:
forgotten as it happens, recalled before it has begun.
In ‘Black Box’, he is preoccupied with the idea of something that has seen it all. This poem is a bleak account of a ‘crashed marriage’ in which:
the black box is what survives;
anthracite gleaming in the wreckage where, preserved in anger,
the voices that it holds replay their lifetime of last moments
and speak of how, until the very end, it might have all been
so different; and how, right from the start, they knew it never would.
McGuinness is interested in listeners as much as overheard voices. There’s something of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Remains of the Day about his poem ‘The Companions’:
You see us in the margins of our photographs, then in the margins
of their wills: governesses in our purgatory of déclassement,
somewhere between the housekeeper and family doctor.
Loss and preservation are recurring themes in the poems of Jilted City: the loss and trace memory of identity (originally from Belgium, McGuinness often pays homage to a landscape he feels separate from, journeying through them on trains rather than stopping); the end of relationships and their enduring influence; or the strange ‘waiting room of language’ (‘XV Marbehan’). McGuinness often mentions formaldehyde in his work and language itself is described as having an ‘embalming’ quality. The idea that we write to outlast ourselves is a familiar one, but McGuinness subverts this subtly with the humorous ‘Poem in White Ink’, conspicuous in its absence on the page. The poem’s epigraph, Maeterlinck’s observation that ‘happiness writes white’, offers an interesting insight into McGuinness’s view of art. This is certainly a collection full of bleak images, both haunted and haunting. Dust ‘knows the places we have forgotten, or we never see’ (‘The Shape of Nothing Happening’). Absences are gently invoked in ‘The Age of the Empty Chair’: ‘the way a sail suggests the wind’.
In ‘L’Air du Temps’, the narrator is possessed by a different absence:
Tracing her perfume, link by link of vapour,
through the crowd to where she’s not, to where
her scent expands itself in air
I pass through as if the ghost was me, not her.
That imaginary progress is a nice motif for the way the reader moves through Jilted City, as if following a music that tantalizes us, fading away when we draw close. This is a collection with one foot in the world and one foot outside it. Not surprising, then, that towards the end of the book McGuinness asserts ‘Article 0.5: The Right to Be In-Between’, a celebration of ‘signatories of the dotted sideline’, of ‘citizens of the hard shoulder’:
the slipstream and the tributary, the river that changes its name,
the visa that’s all in the vista and the port that’s all in the passing.
Jilted City is at times a hungry book, about the appetites that drive us – ‘Daytime Drinking’ is an elegant, perfect evocation of what it is to crave something, ‘the rudderless slide back to thirst’. Interestingly, in ‘The Other Side’, McGuinness asserts that the dead ‘are not nostalgic’. Is it this nostalgia, then, this hunger for what we cannot truly taste, that keeps us alive? This is what Dawkins’s compelling prose seems to lack; his rejection of the supernatural, of what he calls ‘bad poetry’ is persuasive, but his world view leaves us a little bit too contented. Whilst Dawkins may be right when he says that ‘mysteries do not lose their poetry when solved’, the solution is not necessarily where the poetry is to be found. What poetry gives us, at its best, is a hunger for what we cannot touch, a thirst that can’t be slaked, a glimpse of what we can see but can’t reach. This is what Keats’s ‘negative capability’ really means.
While Dawkins has much to say about the dichotomy between the scientist and the artist, Pascale Petit’s What the Water Gave Me is an unflinching portrait of a life lived in pursuit of art. The collection is a sequence of poems in the voice of the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, informed in part by Petit’s own experience as a visual artist. Poems about visual art often make the reader question what the poem can offer that the original image could not, but here Petit subverts the question; the portrait being painted here is Kahlo’s, and this is primarily a vivid character piece, even though individual poems take their titles from Kahlo’s paintings. These poems are largely dystopian, unsettling and disorientating – a reflection of Kahlo’s life (she was traumatized by a near fatal bus accident as a teenager that left her in pain for the rest of her life) but also a reflection on the often tempestuous nature of creation. Flowers and fruit are often grotesque: a husband opens his bride ‘like an unripe papaya’; hummingbirds are a threat; necklaces are made of thorns. A woman runs down the street:
with her intestines in her hands,
holding them up like the fruits of the earth.
(‘Fruits of the Earth’)
Kahlo’s relationship with the muralist Diego Riviera – a marriage marred by infidelities and miscarriages – is a wound that the narrator picks at throughout the book. It’s a daunting task to write about another person’s experience of love, but Petit manages to evoke the complexity of a relationship both destructive and life affirming. Diego is a passionate presence in these poems, threat and saviour. ‘Remembrance of a wound’ begins ‘Whenever we make love, you say / it’s like fucking a crash’, though earlier in the same poem, he has ‘soft painter’s hands’ and in other pieces, whispers encouragements to her from the mirror as she paints. Petit frequently uses images of butchery and slaughter. What the Water Gave Me may be an abattoir at times, but it is one permeated by sunlight. Art is its own redemption. As Petit has Kahlo remark in ‘My Birth’:
Even my unhappiest paintings
will be joyful. Look at how
I wear my mother’s body
like a regional dress –
As a portrait of art itself, What the Water Gave Me is entirely unselfconscious and unflinching. To a reader not familiar with Kahlo’s work, it stands alone as an evocation of the difficulties of artistic vision, addressing the same questions as Jo Shapcott in Of Mutability. As Petit observes in her poem ‘Still Life’, the world is renewed and irrevocably changed through the act of looking and recording:
The sun and the moon
have shrunk
to the size of an orange
and a pomegranate
They hover above
my bedside table
daring me to taste them.
Dawkins couldn’t have captured awe so succinctly. Poetry, it seems, steps in when science finds itself lost for words.
Helen Mort is currently poet-in-residence at The Wordsworth Trust. Her latest pamphlet a pint for the ghost was published by tall-lighthouse.
