Thylazine: The Australian Journal of Arts, Ethics & Literature #11/thyla11f-tsbook
AUSTRALIAN POETRY BOOK REVIEWS
Beginnings & Endings: A sonnet sequence by Thomas Shapcott
(Picaro Press, Warners Bay, NSW, Australia, 2003, ISBN: 1920957022, $10.00)
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Picaro Press has been producing a number of very slim chapbooks on a theme. Small in conception, subtly attractive in design, and inexpensive to purchase, the idea is to bring poetry to as broad an audience as possible. Beginnings & Endings by one of Australia's most prolific and well known poets, Adelaide University's Creative Writing professor Thomas Shapcott, is one of these chapbooks. The book is only 24 pages, stapled and presented in an appealing beige bagasse cover with an etching of a tree. Inside there are 22 poems, each no longer than a page (and most shorter), and all celebrating or mourning, in some way, a youth now gone. |
Amongst the beginnings are 3 poems set on Denmark Hill. From the first piece, "Beginnings I," Shapcott sets up the "character" of the spider, a camouflaged observer of a changing and fragile world. Denmark Hill changes as the spider observer grows, becoming the small town's symbol with its large water tower and role in the War, but also as a place of play, a concrete image made insecure by the fragility of youth and of the loss of that sense of safety that is meant to characterise youth:
There was an old cave in the limestone
where we hid forbidden cigarettes. We had begun
to be devious. But the burning seams had been lit, they seeped
in. We did not need Wars to frighten us.
Underneath, the whole place we stood on was dangerous.("Beginnings III," 5)
There are also 3 endings, although these are scattered throughout the book, eking themselves out, as endings often do, between other bouts of nostalgia and growing pain. All of the endings emphasise this spider character, left behind - the unseen observer of time's passage. The first ending is the loss of a friend, captured in the co-mingled irritation and wonder of sifting through items once rich with meaning: "The ghosts erupt in their shadows/as if every item, once touched, opens doors and windows." ("Endings", 6) The second is richer still, taking the waxy and ethereal voice of memory: "Personal wax leaves a smudge, a trail that leaves ghostly tracks." ("Endings II", 16). The final ending finishes the book, and reveals the spider, silent and watchful, living "forgotten fragments, dust mites and the minute carcass of something once animal." ("Endings III", 24) These endings are the voice of a survivor. They are sad, ironic, and tremendously lonely, made of the seemingly incongruous, the leftover, and the forgotten.
In between the beginnings and endings of these poems are pieces rather more mundane, but perhaps representative of the everyday sensual items of life. There are waxy and easily found, and taken for granted, papaws and chokos. Both of these are so tasteless and iconic that the passage from childhood to adulthood is symbolised by the motion from backyard bane to gourmet produce:
There was no way out. It was home-grown,
that's the moral in Wartime. We swallowed the fruit with hard looks
not dreaming that papaws were lush, exotic, a taste
to be acquired. These many years later I think of the waste." (Backyard Boys II", 8)
The varying perspective on foods is also revealed in the passage from 'Eggplant', "Beneath the purple surface,/the taste, we knew, would be strange, perhaps poisonous". (9) to the lush fresh salad of frilled Aubergine slices, the sexy oiled Melonzane of delis and finally to the sweet headiness of Brinjal. Here is, of course, a little joke in the varying titles of the same fruit, which nonetheless conjure up entirely different tastes, just as life's perspective, or even death changes the meaning of the same piece of memory. Other poems in this brief collection move past parents, past animals owned, preserved vegetables, including exploding eggs, and the pervasiveness of genetics:
My own children wear selves they have grown into
but ancestors glint between every line
precisely when each one insists: I am alone! ("Twist of the Dice", 17)
Although these poems are full of the exuberance of lost youth, overall, they come across as quiet, introspective, and sad. Everything being celebrated, from the blandness of childhood chokos to the sweetness of a fine meal is gone: "why pump up the past?" (19)
We are left with fingernails, the waxy residue of fingerprints, the hazy sienna of memory snapshots, and of course whatever DNA we've passed on. It isn't much, but perhaps that "silk web strong as wire" is everything.
Beginnings & Endings is an evocative look at the passage of time, and what remains when everything else is gone. It packs a fair amount of subtlety into a small package, and is very nicely presented, with a tight, powerful structure.
(Reviewed by Magdalena Ball, June 2006)
I Next I
Back I
Exit I
Thylazine No.11 (June, 2006) | |
