{"id":1078,"date":"2011-03-18T14:25:26","date_gmt":"2011-03-18T13:25:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/blog\/?p=1078"},"modified":"2016-01-23T19:27:56","modified_gmt":"2016-01-23T18:27:56","slug":"jo-shapcott-of-mutability-faber-and-faber-64-pp-hardback-1299-paperback-999","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=1078","title":{"rendered":"Jo Shapcott, Of Mutability<\/em> (Faber and Faber) \u00a39.99, reviewed by Edmund Prestwich"},"content":{"rendered":"

Of Mutability<\/em> is a book about death and change. Some of its poems hauntingly evoke unease, fear and loss. What is astonishing is how often the same poems, looked at from another angle, twinkle with humour, playfulness and resilient vitality. \u201cProcedure\u201d, the penultimate piece, is one of the most poignantly life-affirming poems I know. Here, the guard of humour is dropped completely, but the final poem, \u201cPiss Flower\u201d, blends elements that are wonderfully funny with others that aren\u2019t funny at all in an amazing fusion of rude wit with grace. This is an immediately accessible and enjoyable book. It\u2019s also a highly sophisticated one that gradually draws the reader in to explore depths and complexities of tone and resonance that may not be noticed at first. The poems invite repeated reading because each fresh encounter with them refracts feelings and ideas in new ways, but understanding them seldom involves solving puzzles.<\/span><\/p>\n

In terms of style, the wild, flashy energy and linguistic exuberance that were so thrilling in Phrase Book<\/em> and My Life Asleep<\/em> have been pruned back hard in Of Mutability<\/em>. The effect is not at all to weaken the imaginative force of the poetry. If anything, it\u2019s the reverse. Extravagant fantasy and dry, subversive or surreal humour are as evident as ever, but the quieter language in which they\u2019re expressed allows a subtler, more shifting interplay of tones than in the earlier books. Shapcott shows remarkable fineness of touch in the way she springs idea after idea in the reader\u2019s mind. In the title poem, for example, we start with a very direct, strong yet simple statement of the speaker\u2019s situation as a cancer sufferer that draws us in instantly as if we were walking with her:<\/p>\n

Too many of the best cells in my body
\nAre itching, feeling jagged, turning raw
\nIn this spring chill. It\u2019s two thousand and four \u2026<\/p>\n

In the next line and a half there\u2019s a muted yet enormous shift:<\/p>\n

and I don\u2019t know a soul who doesn\u2019t feel small
\namong the numbers. Razor small.<\/p>\n

Without taking our eyes off the immediate situation, in language as grounded as the pavement she\u2019s walking on, Shapcott has invoked something like the metaphysical perspective of Pascal\u2019s \u201cle silence \u00e9ternel de ces espaces infinis m\u2019effraie\u201d but she\u2019s expressed it in a down to earth way, without fuss or pretension, as something we all feel. <\/span><\/p>\n

This is a honed collection, full of variety but showing a profound thematic coherence. There\u2019s not a poem in it that I wouldn\u2019t love to discuss in detail. The first three pieces (all sonnets) all evoke the speaker\u2019s cancer but do so in terms of an impressively varied range of suggestion, making radically different metaphorical connections between cellular change and the processes of life in the surrounding world and showing sharply differentiated phases of the speaker\u2019s coming to terms with her situation. Age, sickness, mortality and love are conjured up with extraordinary power in the tender, almost shockingly physical \u201cAbishag\u201d (after Rilke\u2019s \u201cAbisag\u201d, but radically reoriented by making Abishag herself the speaker). The prose poem \u201cScorpion\u201d is memorable for its violence, the hypnotically rhythmical drumming of repeated phrases, the instant familiarity of the feelings it evokes and (again) the wide range of metaphorical suggestion it extracts from them. Brilliant descriptions of new buildings in London shiningly celebrate life as change. Complementing these, six ethereally lovely short poems on the remains of Roman and medieval castles on the Scottish and Welsh borders, reflect the way change implies death, but do so with a sense of serene acceptance. With its alert references to our changing everyday lives and to science, this is a very contemporary book, but it\u2019s soaked in awareness of the continuing life of the past. A pervasive double perspective combines being completely at home in the now with revelling in the layers of the past within it, and in doing so reflects the book\u2019s fundamental theme. \u201cReligion for Girls\u201d wittily plays old meanings of words and ideas against modern ones as it plays the names of old gods against the tribulations of modern life \u2013 \u201ca local London genius for this and that\u201d, for example, punning on the idea of the genius loci and the modern meaning of someone brilliant at something \u2013 but it ends with the homely, sublime, timeless idea of how we \u201cgo about our business following \/ the invincible sun from east to west\u201d; phrasing as colourless in itself as clear water but in its place in the poem somehow lit with wonder, momentarily turning the tired crowds of London women into heliotropic flowers, and simultaneously reminding us of our utter subjection to time. At the end of the volume, \u201cProcedure\u201d and \u201cPiss Flower\u201d bring this double sense of time to its finest point where gratitude for the then and now of bodily life takes on a religious intensity that is heightened, not diminished by its subversive wit in playing the sober gold of tea against the rude gold of piss, or making a parabola of piss the stem of a flower of grace. This is a profoundly wise, profoundly humane book. More, it is great poetry.<\/span><\/p>\n

 
\nEdmund Prestwich<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Of Mutability is a book about death and change. Some of its poems hauntingly evoke unease, fear and loss. What is astonishing is how often the same poems, looked at from another angle, twinkle with humour, playfulness and resilient vitality. \u201cProcedure\u201d, the penultimate piece, is one of the most poignantly life-affirming poems I know. Here, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[13,283],"tags":[139,188],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nJo Shapcott, Of Mutability (Faber and Faber) \u00a39.99, reviewed by Edmund Prestwich - The Manchester Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=1078\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Jo Shapcott, Of Mutability (Faber and Faber) \u00a39.99, reviewed by Edmund Prestwich - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Of Mutability is a book about death and change. 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