{"id":6916,"date":"2016-12-01T17:07:26","date_gmt":"2016-12-01T16:07:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=6916"},"modified":"2016-12-01T17:11:08","modified_gmt":"2016-12-01T16:11:08","slug":"ruth-sharman-scarlet-tiger-templar-poetry-10","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=6916","title":{"rendered":"Ruth Sharman, Scarlet Tiger<\/em> (Templar Poetry, \u00a310)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ruth Sharman\u2019s Scarlet Tiger<\/em> comes some time after her first collection, Birth of the Owl Butterflies<\/em>; its title poem a second place winner in the Arvon Poetry Competition. In this book too, there are poems about butterflies and Sharman\u2019s father. Indeed the interest in, near obsession with, butterflies is clearly inherited from her father, as a number of these poems attest. <\/p>\n

Sharman\u2019s poems move down the page with a sure-footed delicacy. In \u2018The White Room\u2019, the poem accumulates early detail: \u2018\u2026the glimmer\/ of crab apples. Or a cat sprawled\/ on a roof. Susan Trickett\u2019s\/ ample green bosom pressed\/ against the rungs of a stepladder\/ two doors down, anything\/ that anchored you still to the earth.\u2019 These details move us to that final perception of the mental state of the observer. That suggestion that things are not quite as they might be is reinforced by the next line, \u2018Every sudden flash of wings\/ would count.\u2019 The reader is not told what the wings would count for<\/strong>. But what we get at the end of the poem is the portrait of the observer sitting in a window alcove, \u2018\u2026with a book\/ on summer afternoons\/ half-listening to your mother\/ rattling the tea things downstairs\/ and that voice calling\/ from the evergreens: Two cows,\/ Taffy. Take two cows, Taffy. Take.<\/em>\u2019 Sharman\u2019s short lines move the reader neatly through these accumulations, but the accumulations often subtly subvert the expectations they themselves accrete. <\/p>\n

These lines also give a flavour of Sharman\u2019s voice. It is essentially unadorned, but it is a voice which draws the lines down the page quietly but surely. There is that unusual noun phrase \u2018a glimmer of crab-apples\u2019, but there is little \u2018poetic\u2019 about the writing. In the second set of quoted lines, the participles \u2018half-listening\u2019, \u2018rattling\u2019, \u2018calling\u2019, create a suspension in the action. Thus Sharman never over-sells her insight; the language never obtrudes in the telling. <\/p>\n

Identity in Sharman\u2019s writing is mutable and often quite fragile. Masculinity, in particular, in a book dedicated \u2018for my father and my son\u2019, is never certain. If Sharman\u2019s father is adept with a killing jar, he is also \u2018shy, awkward, complex\u2019. If he is capable of \u2018running at the double to fetch\/ the cap he left in a field five miles back\u2019, he is also \u2018most at home in bogs\/ and on tangled hillsides watching\/ for the likes of this butterfly\/ that\u2019s just come flittering over\/ the garden fence\u2019 (\u2018Talking to myself\u2019). But he is also the father on morphine at the end of his life. If Sharman\u2019s son has a childhood stammer, he also declares that the best present he could have for Christmas is to see God. And he is also the son whose flight path she follows on her computer screen as he flies out to Kathmandu. And these are not only poems which see that identity enacted in filial relationships. Sharman\u2019s quiet skill is to show how identity within the home reaches out and finds its place in a much wider and various world. <\/p>\n

Sharman refines and renders her poems with a perfectionist\u2019s eye; so each poem has an inevitability and robustness which fits with Yeats\u2019 sense of the poem coming together like a well-made box clicking into place. In a better world, Sharman\u2019s writing would be as recognised as that of poets as different from her as Vicki Feaver and Selima Hill. <\/p>\n

Scarlet Tiger<\/em> is available to buy from Templar Poetry<\/a>.<\/h5>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ruth Sharman\u2019s Scarlet Tiger comes some time after her first collection, Birth of the Owl Butterflies; its title poem a second place winner in the Arvon Poetry Competition. In this book too, there are poems about butterflies and Sharman\u2019s father. Indeed the interest in, near obsession with, butterflies is clearly inherited from her father, as […]<\/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":"\nRuth Sharman, Scarlet Tiger (Templar Poetry, \u00a310) - 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=6916\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Ruth Sharman, Scarlet Tiger (Templar Poetry, \u00a310) - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Ruth Sharman\u2019s Scarlet Tiger comes some time after her first collection, Birth of the Owl Butterflies; its title poem a second place winner in the Arvon Poetry Competition. 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