Luci Shaw: A Tribute on her 91st Birthday
I first came across the poetry of Luci Shaw in the 1970s. In fact, the very first of her poems that I read made such an impression on me that I went looking for other poems by her. And that was in spite of there being no internet in those days. As I was born and studying in India, it was both difficult and long-winded to try to get hold of any information at all on contemporary poets. By kind courtesy of some American friends, I finally succeeded in getting hold of her first volume of poetry, and that confirmed my impression of the quality of her work. As I followed her work over the decades, I had a growing conviction that she is one of the few contemporary poets whose work will last.
Here is that first poem of Luci Shaw’s which I had the privilege to read; even now, decades and hundreds of re-readings later, it still makes my heart stop at its deft handling of theme and its adroit positioning of paradoxes which puts one in mind of the Metaphysical poets:
MARY'S SONG
Blue homespun and the bend of my breast
keep warm this small hot naked star
fallen to my arms. (Rest...
you who have had so far
to come.) Now nearness satisfies
the body of God sweetly. Quiet he lies
whose vigor hurled
a universe. He sleeps
whose eyelids have not closed before.
His breath (so slight it seems
no breath at all) once ruffled the dark deeps
to sprout a world.
Charmed by dove's voices, the whisper of straw,
he dreams,
hearing no music from his other spheres.
Breath, mouth, ears, eyes
he is curtailed
who overflowed all skies,
all years.
Older than eternity, now he
is new. Now native to earth as I am, nailed
to my poor planet, caught that I might be free,
blind in my womb to know my darkness ended,
brought to this birth
for me to be new-born,
and for him to see me mended
I must see him torn.
How come a Hindu like me responded to such a poem? Well, we have no problem with religion in general, nor with Christian themes, in the same way as a Japanese has no problem with the music of Bach. Both the Japanese and the Indian are responding to the technical excellence of the work.
So what are the technical features of this poem?
The tone is entirely conversational and the rhyme-scheme of the first six lines (a, b, a, b, c, c) signals that she will use rhyme, but the departures from that reasonably strong suggestion in the 7th, 8th and 9th lines (d, e, f) tell us that, though she can use full rhyme, she will depart from that as necessary to her purpose. As it happens, the (d) of line 7 (“hurled”) gets picked up in line 12 (“world”). Equally, the (e) of line 8 (“sleeps”) gets picked up in line 11 (“deeps”). But the (f) of line 9 (“before”) doesn’t get picked up till the weak rhyme “for” in the middle of the second-last line. The second para’s first line ends with “seems”, which doesn’t get picked up till “dreams” in the middle of the second para’s fifth line. One line-ending doesn’t get rhymed at all (“straw” in line 4 of the second para). However, after that, every other line is rhymed - the poem sweeping to triumphant close with the last 14 lines having a full rhyme in a complex pattern.
The use of rhyme is, however, the least striking feature of the poem.
The most striking is the enjambments which, while keeping the tone conversational, unfailingly cause the emphasis to be on the right word, for example:
“… the bend of my breast
keep warm this small hot naked star
fallen…."
Some readers will no doubt disagree, finding in the fresh paradoxes coined by Shaw the true centre of the quality of the poem: “Older than eternity, now he/ is new”, “Quiet he lies/ whose vigor hurled/ a universe. He sleeps/ whose eyelids have not closed before” and, most powerfully “caught that I might be free,/ blind in my womb to know my darkness ended,/ brought to this birth/ for me to be new-born,/ and for him to see me mended/ I must see him torn”.
Even those who disagree entirely with Mariolatry must surely admire the technical skill of this poem. And the interesting thing, if you research Mariolatry, is that the poem is in fact subversive of Mariolatry – for Shaw is neither a follower of Eastern Orthodoxy nor a Roman Catholic but an Anglican. It is quite extraordinary that she manages the subversion while at the same time affirming the stark and unique nature of the alternative faced by Mary, and the choice freely made - as well as acknowledging the unutterable heartbreak entailed by that choice.
However, Shaw ranges over the full spectrum of human emotions in relation to the divine. Here is possibly the bitterest poem Shaw has published:
WHAT I NEEDED TO DO
I made for grief a leaden bowl
and drank it, every drop.
And though I thought I’d downed it all
the hurting didn’t stop.
I made of hope a golden sieve
to drain my world of pain.
Though I was sure I’d bled it dry
the void filled up again.
I made of words a silver fork
and stabbed love in the heart,
and when I found the sweetness gone
I chewed it into art.
The bitterness is regulated and “chewed” into art at least partly by the use of rhyme, rhythm and imagery (a leaden bowl, a golden sieve, a silver fork).
I discuss below the fact that Shaw doesn’t follow fashion, but her determination to be herself doesn’t prevent her writing on topics that are perennial, such as nature. We see this in a poem such as “The Golden Carp” or, as below, in “Holding On”:
Seven days since the storm
snowed itself out and moved east, and still
the fat clots of white lodge themselves
in the twig forks, held up to the world
to be noticed. I shot it all on film to help
my memory of how cold feels.
Most of all, I had to catch this snow fruit
crotched in place by the black dogwood,
snared by a relentless frost that won't
let go, won't give in, even to the sun.
The integrity of the season's fierce
cold. How rigidly it holds
the winter fruit's secret crystals,
inviolate, persistent at the heart.
On my dining table, in a wood
bowl, wait the five dried pomegranates
I have saved for a friend. Like me, for now,
decay has passed them by, their red skin
dried to a tough brown leather,
the little teeth of sepals crimped
in a crown of sharp kisses that guard
the secret seeds, dark purses
for juice that will never be spilled.
Some of Shaw’s poems in celebration of nature arise from her travels to locations such as Nicaragua, where the natural and the anthropological are in harmony:
THE SONGS OF CAMOAPA
Dusk deep enough for the thin moon to plead Look! look!
A salt of stars echo with their white Wink, wink.
Vroom, vroom goes the ancient taxi down the cobbled hill.
Sweet, sweet, sobs the bird in the mango tree.
The plantains in the fry pan spatter Spit, spit.
Good red beans and rice beckon Feed, feed.
Chruk, chruk, the scrawny chickens peck underfoot.
The bird in the mango tree shrills Sweet, sweet.
The barn cat in heat stalks the alley--Yowl, yowl.
Lurch, lurch, sways the truck up to the work site.
The bones in my back whimper Ugh, ugh.
Sweet, sweet, sighs the bird in the mango tree.
The saw bites the plank in two directions--Ta-co, Ta-co.
Crunch, Crunch, mutter shovels heaving gravel,
Then Swish, swish, as the water makes cement.
Sweet, sweet, calls the bird in the mango tree.
The hammers on the nails pound pom-pom, pom-pom.
Cock-a-roo-roo declares the rooster on the hill.
Rattle, rattle, rattle, fume the wind-dried palm fronds.
Sweet, sweet, sings the bird in the mango tree.
Hola, Hola, shout the children of Lomas de Cafen.
Water from the new well gushes Drink, Drink.
Gracias! Gracias! cry the women with their washing.
Sweet, sweet trills the bird in the mango tree.
That poem makes effective use of traditional metrical form with experimental use of repetition, which together capture the slow, rhythmic feel of life in many tropical lands.
But Shaw is no nature romantic, seeing in a particularly clear-eyed way the depredations of nature, not least in her own body, as in “Sonnet for My Left Hip”:
I felt an ache that sleeping could not drown.
It ran from my left hip joint to my mind—
nagged at my thinking as I drove to town.
All night I’d shifted in my thin nightgown
to find a pose to rest in. Now I find
pain stabs me climbing up or reaching down.
Why does this symptom, heavy as a stone,
quicken to a darkness for my mind
to niggle at? It’s likely just a bone
That calcified and brought my mind around
to fears of diminution. We’re all destined
for aching as the world is round…
Poignantly, in “Leaf, fallen”, she writes of the long last days of her own mother:
What held the browning leaf to its stem
so long—a link that lasted a summer’s life time?
How ineluctably sap left the veins,
the spine curled. I hear again my mother’s complaint
on each of her fifteen final years’ visits from me,
I’ve lost a lot of ground this week,
as though ground were the one thing
valuable enough to cling to as the bones clot
and flesh loses mass and skin cells flake
along with the mind’s most basic reminders.
Her friend had called her “a little brown bird.”
She wore the russet color well but never sang.
Intractable, hanging on for nearly
a hundred years into an age that challenged
her understandings, duty was the word
that rallied her, not love, not living. And I,
her green leaf child, grew, and grew away, aching
always, for more than obligation, a need for richness that
offended her. In the cold’s wither she finally let go,
let go of me. Clipped by a biting wind from a naked stem,
she fell to that ground she thought she’d lost.
Naturally, Shaw doesn’t write only on serious or momentous subjects. Some poems are “found”, on quotidian themes, as in “The Possibilities of Clay” where glistening balls of clay turn “each its own small, malleable planet” which “kiln-hardened,/ … will then be ready to offer themselves/ for decoration—brilliant pigments// in wild and quirky designs. Glazed,/ strung on strings, they will become// jewels hurled into the world to show/ that humble earth can turn beautiful”.
Alternatively, here is her poem “Photos from My Trip”:
Inching out of the printer, here come
the slits of color that reveal a field in Devon
blazing like green fire, and a thatched cottage
and a couple of sheep and a horse. And Bath,
and gargoyles grinning from a pillared bas-relief.
Here comes Clovelly; tangled turquoise fishnets
drying on the rocks. And here’s my husband sketching
and the tide behind him pushing into
the narrow harbor, lifting the boats from the mud
almost as fast as this print is pulsing out of
the machine’s mouth. Here comes the day
rising over Glastonbury Tor, and the abbey
un-restored, a mouth gaping at heaven.
Here’s Bibury and its swans and the stream full of
the shapes of dark trout. Here come the clouds,
and then a blurred photo with rain on the lens.
Now it’s Exeter Cathedral and a late sun
burning red through a glassy Jesus onto my hand,
the hand that receives him now, urged out
bit by bit like a baby from the womb, on a blank
sheet of photo paper with colored ink
from a cartridge I bought at the store.
Occasionally, and inevitably, Shaw writes on poetry itself, as in “Signs”:
….A word that opens
an unfinished poem like a key in a lock.
In “Catch of the day”, she compares the labours of line-fishing with those of writing – even those of writing mere notes in a notebook:
It leaps, breaking the skin of the lake
of possibility, this thing that flashes steel—
this trout of a poem, wild with life, rainbow scales
and spiny fins. Now, for patience, the pull of the catch:
I cast, wait for the jerk--the tug of hook in bony jaw--
feel the line go taut. The ballet begins, a wrestle
to land this flailing, feral thing--all thrash and edge--
and tame it into telling its own muscular story.
I heave it over the rim of its arrival, glorious,
fighting the whole way, slippery as language.
Its beauty twitches on the floor boards, its glisten
spilling over the lip of my notebook page.
Shaw is a determinedly unfashionable poet, true to herself, whether writing formal metrical poetry or using experimental forms, whether exploring faith or doubt, celebration or disappointment, everyday experiences or universal themes.
To my mind, her work raises the question: What is the hallmark of authentic poetry? On the basis of her work, I would answer: authentic poetry makes you sit up, resonates in your imagination, your heart, your mind, rings a bell, makes a space for itself in your memory so that, even if you disagree with it, you stand for a moment admiringly in the shoes of the poet. And, even if you don’t remember many words of it, the emotion, the sensation, the feeling evoked by the poem lodges itself in your mind, your heart, your personality – and changes you in some small way for ever.
That leads me to my final reflections:
Luci Shaw is almost entirely unknown, published in only a very few poetry magazines, and (as far as I am aware) has not won a single poetry competition.
But is that perhaps because the worldwide poetry scene has become incestuous? Poetry competitions are judged, and poetry magazines edited, largely by poets who are successful according to current notions of poetry – precisely when those notions have largely lost the public.
Are there other poets, like Luci Shaw, who are resisting the blandishments of what is modish, and ploughing their own lonely furrow – which will, one day, perhaps raise a new generation of people who will value poetry once again?
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