Sunday, January 29, 2012

The Child-Stealer by Penelope Shuttle (1983)

This is Shuttle's second volume of poetry, to the volume publication of which she came only at a later stage of her career. She seems to me to have two modes here: firstly the poems of emotional description, and secondly the poems of metaphoric mystery. Many of the first type are really impressive in their broad-visioned examination of relationships, particularly between mother and daughter, scything in slowly all manner of pictures, concatenations and moods. Shuttle's usual sloe-eyed careful teasings-out serve these well. The other group, the metaphoric-mystery pieces, are often I think poems of menstruation, a favourite Shuttle-subject. But somehow here the communication loses its bite. Maybe that's my maleness talking. They seem slippery and vague, not to put too fine a point on it! They cover other subjects too, though, equally dissatisfyingly. The sense of a blurred background of landscape pervades all these pieces, with the points of reference and clarity being emotional. When those are lead up to sequentially and with open vision a kind of balance results. When the blur wins out, the reader is left effectively sargassoed.

No comments:

Post a Comment