{"id":878,"date":"2012-09-18T11:45:52","date_gmt":"2012-09-18T11:45:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=878"},"modified":"2014-02-11T21:53:59","modified_gmt":"2014-02-11T21:53:59","slug":"jo-shapcott-her-book-2-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=878","title":{"rendered":"Jo Shapcott – Her Book 2 – Life"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the things I love about Shapcott\u2019s poetry is its passionate and joyful embrace of the world.<\/p>\n

A poem reflecting on this in general terms is \u201cLife\u201d, which you can find here\u00a0 http:\/\/ijcooper.hostoi.com\/NewPoems\/Shapcott_Life.htm<\/a><\/p>\n

The speaker of the poem describes three lives, as bat, frog and iguana or hearing, touch and tongue. I want to comment a bit on the last of these.<\/p>\n

When a poet writes about tongue and mouth we tend to think of them as organs of expression, but Shapcott\u2019s poem presents the tongue as a means of discovery, a way of receiving<\/em> the world:<\/p>\n

My life as an iguana
\nis for tasting
\neverything.<\/p>\n

My tongue is very fast
\nbecause the flavour
\nof the air is so subtle.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s long enough
\nto surprise
\nthe smallest piece of you<\/p>\n

from extremely
\nfar away.
\nIguana death is a closed mouth.<\/p>\n

One thing that makes the embrace so joyful is the humour. I love the teasing hesitation before \u201ceverything\u201d, such a gift to the performer, who can interpret it in a range of very different ways, as coyness, as brashly self-dramatising emphasis, or as awe at the sheer immensity of what the world offers. The play on meanings in \u201cfast\u201d has some obvious components, like the visual image of the rapid flickering of an iguana\u2019s tongue, the idea of someone talking fast and the idea of a \u201cfast\u201d woman. For the Shapcott reader there\u2019s also an imaginative link to \u201cCheetah Run\u201d. But of course the poetry isn\u2019t something you find by separating out the components, it\u2019s something that ignites when they come together, sparking off each other and interacting with the other ideas in the stanza in such complicated, subtle and indefinable ways. \u00a0I love the bold innuendo of the third stanza of the quotation. Above all, though, I love the swerving of tones that keeps it all so alive, that makes the writing itself so fast and subtle, so responsive to the sheer diversity of the world.<\/p>\n

Metrical structure plays a crucial part here. No doubt the short-lined form is partly a way of capturing the quick, explosive flickering of the iguana\u2019s tongue, but it also both emphasises this swerving of tones between lines, and gives breathing space to the competing play of different tones within them.<\/p>\n

\u201cCapturing\u201d brings me back to the meaning of this section of the poem as a whole. The poet captures the world by making it live in words. Clearly Shapcott isn\u2019t in any sense trying to suppress<\/em> the idea of the tongue as an organ of expression. What I think she\u2019s suggesting is that for the kind of poet she is, reception and expression of the world go hand in hand, are almost one thing. A closed mouth is iguana death because it means ceasing to experience the world by \u201ctasting\u201d it. It\u2019s also poet death, because it means ceasing to express<\/em> it.<\/p>\n

\u201cLife\u201d is a very sexy poem and of course it may be that in Shapcott\u2019s private life \u201cyou\u201d refers to an actual and particular person. What comes through for the reader is the joky but intense eroticising of the poet\u2019s contact with the world and creation of poetry. In that sense I suppose it is addressed to the Muse who fertilises the poet\u2019s imagination and makes it create.<\/p>\n

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

One of the things I love about Shapcott\u2019s poetry is its passionate and joyful embrace of the world. A poem reflecting on this in general terms is \u201cLife\u201d, which you can find here\u00a0 http:\/\/ijcooper.hostoi.com\/NewPoems\/Shapcott_Life.htm The speaker of the poem describes three lives, as bat, frog and iguana or hearing, touch and tongue. I want to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-878","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-jo-shapcott"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/878"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=878"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/878\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1367,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/878\/revisions\/1367"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=878"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=878"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=878"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}