{"id":11170,"date":"2020-01-21T14:36:50","date_gmt":"2020-01-21T13:36:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=11170"},"modified":"2020-01-21T14:42:09","modified_gmt":"2020-01-21T13:42:09","slug":"brenda-shaughnessy-the-octopus-museum-reviewed-by-ian-pople","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=11170","title":{"rendered":"Brenda Shaughnessy | The Octopus Museum<\/em><\/strong> | reviewed by Ian Pople"},"content":{"rendered":"

Brenda Shaughnessy | The Octopus Museum<\/em> | Alfred A. Knopf: $25.00<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Brenda Shaughnessy\u2019s basic style is to have long prose poem lines composed of short, declarative sentences. The effect of this is both to sustain argument while delivering snap and weight. At the same time, there is sometimes a slightly curt, slightly overly driven feel to the writing. In part, that sense of drive is Shaughnessy\u2019s understandable need to react to the world she lives in. This is a reaction mostly to the climate crisis, but also to the political situation of the contemporary US. <\/p>\n

Shaughnessy\u2019s sense of commitment is clear on the Contents\u2019 page. Following on from the focus of the book\u2019s title, the Contents\u2019 page, itself has the heading, \u2018Visitor\u2019s Guide to the OM Exhibits\u2019. The sections in the \u2018Guide\u2019 include: \u2018Special Collection: \u201cAs They Were\u201d\u2019, and \u201cTo Serve Man\u201d: Rituals of the Late Anthropocene Colony\u2019. The final section is entitled, \u2018Permanent Collection: Archive of Pre-Existing Conditions\u2019, the first poem of which is \u2018Are Women People?\u2019. None of these titles can leave the reader in any doubt of Shaughnessy\u2019s position on the current predicament of the planet. <\/p>\n

Shaughnessy also makes the personal, political. The opening poem of the collection is called, \u2018Identity and Community (There is no \u201cI\u201d in \u201cSea\u201d)\u2019. Again, the title announces the preoccupations of the poem. And Shaughnessy writes, \u2018At seaside, I have that familiar feeling sense of being left out, too far to glean the secret: how go in?<\/em> \/ What an inhuman surface the sea has, always open.\u2019 The first thing to not are the solecisms of \u2018At seaside\u2019 and \u2018how go in?<\/em>\u2019. These are unusual in the book, whose address is usually quite straightforward. Here, Shaughnessy seems to mimic the emotional confusions of the narrator. The language describing her physical location and the process needed to engage with that location becomes undermined and fractured by the very attempt at engagement. <\/p>\n

The second section of the book is the section called \u2018Special Collection: \u201cAs They Were\u201d. These poems are highly coloured imaginings of a dystopia in which art, relationships, and even games are subject to the needs of a resource depleted world. These particular poems are richly imagined and immersive; Shaughnessy thinks herself deep into a detailed and evocative place. \u2018Dream of Brown\u2019 begins, \u2018I am dressed in brown, at a long brown wooden table set for twelve, one of many tables stretching forever. \u2026 Each tabletop place is demarcated into sections, a hole for each person to sink a cup so we can barely pull it out by the slightly flared edge when we want to drink. It helps to lever it up with the thin edge of a brown wooden knife.\u2019 Later, Shaughnessy writes, \u2018You sit near me, leaving still one space empty between us. I can\u2019t believe how good I suddenly feel. Excitement, possibility, hope. I think of the ways I could manage to eat in front of you, giddily, clumsily, hardly at all.\u2019 Shaughnessy is adept at conjuring up a rich, inner and outer world with these lines. In doing so, she blurs the boundaries between poetry and fiction, a blurring which has been part the landscape of \u2018poetry\u2019 from Homer on. Like those illustrious predecessors, Shaughnessy is able to pull the reader into a minutely observed world and does it here with a that rather flat style. This style offers the reader a transparent surface through which \u2018action\u2019 and \u2018thought\u2019 take precedence over description. <\/p>\n

The transparent surface of the writing is, perhaps, the dominant strategy of the whole book, which moves through its dystopian text world with increasing urgency. The narrative trajectory of the book ends with a set of persona poems which show society\u2019s progressive disintegration, a disintegration which inevitably leaves the disadvantaged further behind. Towards the end of the book is the poem, \u2018Our family on the Run\u2019, which begins, \u2018Everything organised around Cal in his wheelchair. He can\u2019t walk and I can\u2019t carry him far. We\u2019d have the wheelchair van, as long as we could find gas. Simone in the side seat, Craig and me in the front. \/\/ Maybe spray paint a Super Soaker metallic silver to look like a real weapon?\u2019 Since the names used here are the names of Brenda Shaughnessy\u2019s real family, the poem is especially poignant. <\/p>\n

Shaughnessy\u2019s poems in this book offer a hard-hitting vision of an America in which altruism and kindness are in very short supply. This is a world which has forgotten its responsibilities to both its people and the planet. The book is, as I have tried to suggest, political but also personal, in the way it details the corrosive effect of that lack of responsibility. <\/p>\n

by Ian Pople<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Brenda Shaughnessy | The Octopus Museum | Alfred A. Knopf: $25.00 Brenda Shaughnessy\u2019s basic style is to have long prose poem lines composed of short, declarative sentences. The effect of this is both to sustain argument while delivering snap and weight. At the same time, there is sometimes a slightly curt, slightly overly driven feel […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","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":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[13,283],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nBrenda Shaughnessy | The Octopus Museum | reviewed by Ian Pople - 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=11170\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Brenda Shaughnessy | The Octopus Museum | reviewed by Ian Pople - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Brenda Shaughnessy | The Octopus Museum | Alfred A. 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