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Shipley, Vivian. Hardboot:
Poems New and Old. Louisiana Literature Press. May 1,
2005. 124
pages. ISBN: 0945083130
Vivian Shipley won the 2005 Lifetime Achievement Award
for Service to the Literary Community from the Library of
Congress Connecticut Center for the Book. She also won the
2004 Paterson Prize for Sustained Literary Achievement for
Gleanings: Old Poems, New Poems (Southeastern Louisiana University
Press, 2003) which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. When
There Is No Shore won the 2003 Connecticut Book Award for
Poetry and the 2002 Word Press Poetry Prize. Shipley is a
Judge for the Connecticut Poetry Circuit, Chair of the Sunken
Garden Poetry Festival Committee, Connecticut State University
Distinguished Professor and Editor of Connecticut Review from
Southern Connecticut State University.
A favorite poet of mine, Charles Wright, once said (I’m
paraphrasing) that the obsessions in his poems center on landscape,
language and God. I have found myself attracted to the wide
range of approaches that so many poets explore such similarly
expressed obsessions. Surely it is not too much to say that
land, “place” as it were, is often indelibly associated
with some of the canon’s most revered and remembered
poets of all time. How can one deeply understand Wordsworth
without associating him in the Lake District? Or, to be more
current, James Wright with Ohio, Philip Levine with Detroit,
Carolyn Forche with El Salvador? No doubt, there is far more
subject matter, and “obsessions” for that matter,
than merely the “land” from which a poet entangles,
and it may be equally fascinating to explore poets who have
broader landscape visions (or perhaps none at all), but certainly
the power of land is prominent in many distinguished poets,
young, old, dead, forgotten and everything in between. Land
shapes experience. To my mind, other than Wendell Berry, there
is no poet more clearly and powerfully associated with the
Kentucky landscape than Vivian Shipley.
In her latest collection, Hardboot, Shipley’s poems
center specifically on all three obsessions mentioned by Charles
Wright: landscape and language and the presence of God. If
God is not always present in these poems per se, certainly
at least the numinous, ineffable, and/or spiritual qualities
that come from being grounded specifically in physical, tangible
place (and realized experience) are. One of the essential
themes that pervade not only Hardboot, but all of Shipley’s
work, is that the fruition of these experiences comes from
survival, or through the difficult relationship humans have
with the paradoxical quality of the blessing/curse motif of
suffering. Shipley’s poems are necessary because they
invite the reader to experience with her the necessity of
working through dark winters toward spring, and of forgiveness
of self and others through often painful recovering of the
past. In other words, this is the kind of spirituality expressed
through the power of the literal body to transcend itself.
Deep-rooted spiritual strength, indeed, blossoms in virtually
every poem of this outstanding collection from a woman whose
voice seems to have also reached its own full blossoming.
If this, and her previous collection, When There is No Shore,
demonstrate nothing else, one can surely hear a resonant voice
in the diverse landscape of American poetry, a poet at the
height of her powers. In their considerable range of subject
matter and style, the poems in Hardboot collectively push
toward a Raphael-like “Transfiguration” from which,
as with all great poetry, one rises feeling personally changed—or
at the very least, challenged. The third poem of the five-part
collection, “Survivors Have Victims” opens:
We turn from what destroys us, in time if we can,
and gather what can be held.
Even in all the phases of life that the poems in this collection
explore, one senses a narrative urgency to push through to
the other side of the flora and fauna toward redemption. Thus,
it would seem that in her own distinctive voice, with her
own wit and evocative, palpable language, Shipley’s
latest collection—it may well be argued—pushes
toward an exploration of transcendence through the densely
imagistic, palpable world of Kentucky, family, personal and
collective identity. While the poem explores her home at Devil’s
Land “after the tornado outside Somerset” with
her husband, she considers how he once:
…predicted we would leapfrog old laws
that forbid the marriage of Gentile and Jew.
However effective her husband’s words are at translating
the horrors of “Buchenwald and Belsen,” and the
atrocities of medical practices that forced Jewish women in
labor pangs to keep their “thighs strapped together,”
she realizes that all she can really feel for those women
is “ethical rage.” In the final four tercets,
however, the poem metaphorically pulls together survivors
of the Holocaust, with the three sons and the speaker’s
self as survivors of the loss between her and her husband,
all in context to the situation of her own devastated homeland.
A fascinating—and unnerving—layering of meaning
occurs as the poem concludes:
…I mouthed genocide, holocaust
to meet the challenge of understanding years I could not pull
myself through. When I saw you holding breath in our shower,
I knew you were testing how long you would last if the water
stopped. In time, there were fences between us that kept rising
like hot air, like the gas none of my family had ever inhaled.
Knowing what cannot be swallowed must be spit out or it will
rot like strings of meat caught between teeth, I choked on
soil
planted with your deaths. I couldn’t blanket your grandparents’
shadows, could not pulls three sons away in time from our
flames.
when they smoldered, you fanned them, needing to keep anger
burning, burning through the years that can never be consumed.
By all accounts this poem is deeply personal to the actual
life experience of Shipley herself, and must, in part at least,
explain the more universal concerns of the poem, while also
setting up themes that move throughout the book in various
guises.
“Survivors Have Victims” reminds me of the late
Anthony Hecht’s terrifying “Behold the Lilies
of the Field.” Although considerably different poetic
voices, these two poems draw at least some comparison by virtue
of reference to the Holocaust, one of Hecht’s central
foci throughout his distinguished career (having witnessed
the death camps at the end of the war as a soldier first hand).
Also, the very title of Shipley’s poem indicates a troubling
dimension to—part of the messiness of—survival.
Similarly, Hecht’s speaker recasts the campaign of terror
his mother, presumably a kind of survivor herself, waged upon
the rest of family, especially the father in a kind of elliptical
conceit. The details of the torture inflicted upon the “emperor”
is so disturbing, so haunting, a reader senses something even
potentially more horrific just below the surface of the speaker’s
own experiences. By comparison, the personal and familial
suffering in Shipley’s own “survival” poem
indicates a kind of heightened tension beneath the surface
of what is not reported, of what has been her own kind of
parallel experience to the specific suffering named in Nazi
Germany.
Naturally, there are considerable contrasts between the two
poems; the speaker in Hecht’s, for instance, seems so
shell-shocked from his experience, he can do nothing more
than stutter through the story of living under the regime
of his mother than by making out of it a kind of morbid history
lesson of flaying a conquered emperor alive. The speaker in
Shipley’s poem—a mother herself—doesn’t
pretend to even approach such pain. However, both poems are
singular in that they demand (and reward) re-reading, and
both are concerned with moving beyond the intellectual into
authentic, dramatized (“shown”) pain, as well
as personal and moral outrage.
Now that I’ve drawn comparison to two figures in contemporary
American poetry who cast their own kind of looming shadows,
it seems appropriate to consider Shipley of her own accord.
For instance, for as interesting as it is to consider the
broad application of themes in her work and Wright’s
in terms of landscape, language and God, the two are quite
unlike as poets. Shipley is perhaps no less haunted and fascinated
by her past, but she is no existential/metaphysical poet in
the way Wright is. Rather, for Shipley the landscape is often
a contextual leaping into a kind of hall of mirrors of the
poet’s assimilation of various selves and/or life lessons.
In “Alice Lee Todd In The Looking Glass,” for
instance:
…It’s easier to look at my mother in a mirror
than
to describe what she does to my today in The Arbors.
Unable to speak or feed herself pureed food, she can’t
squeeze
my hand. I remember—cylindrical, spherical, convex,
concave,
flat, or wavy—reflected objects retain their spatial
relationship,
help keep perspective and distance. I become confused only
if I forget, like that time I won the poetry recitation. I
pranced
home, head stuck up prissy as a moccasin swimming on top
of the water. My mother stopped only long enough to twist
her head around from pruning grapevines for wreaths she’d
sell for a pretty penny at Berea College. Nothing’s
changed.
Her bed, my chair are two feet apart but we are not close.
Love
isn’t simply like congruence of our faces in the mirror.
Clean,
it might reflect imperfections or become a channel for unaltered
embodiment: my mother backing into the porch’s screen
door
with her hip or rubbing her forehead with the heel of a hand
after doing supper dishes. To forget, it would be worth the
price
of admission to fun houses with mirrors that distort then
conjoin.
I remember us playing Hearts. I would hold up a fan of cards,
allow them to tilt in order to hide my eyes, mask the need
to win approval. Partial copies of her in carnival mirrors
would
confuse me with artifacts of the mother I want to create,
a past
I need to settle like using place holders to seat guests at
dinner.
Square or round, silvered glass fuses our life to cooking
lessons
on TV, which loses the smell of scored basil leaves and garlic.
An oval gilt mirror might bring us together by curling around
like a gray cat I yearn to be who is untroubled by union of
sight
and smell or impossibility of wholeness. If only my hand were
more than a reflection, I’d reach out, try not to fail
my mother
again: the Kentucky Homecoming Queen who was not crowned…
She goes on to realize that a “mirror will not / show
me what didn’t happen. Unity and completion are needs
/ mirrors can’t fill.” Fortunately for her, she
denotes how poems, unlike mirrors, can interpret and correlate
the internal and external selves, and that through the synthesis
of such memory she can let her mother’s final lesson
be “the word: love.” Thus, for all her survivor
stories and examinations into the historical past of Nazi
Germany and WW2, her vision is nothing like the dark vision
of Hecht’s (as imagined in “A Hill” for
instance, or narrated in “More Light, More Light”).
Her vision is distinctly her own.
However, as Shipley herself is a poet who has been “positioned”
in Connecticut for many years now, is she not split between
two landscapes? Naturally, she does often lift off from the
specifics of the land she resides in now, but ultimately for
wherever Shipley’s restless soul lifts off from, or
wanders to, throughout this most recent collection, she is
ultimately a hardboot—a Kentucky-bred pilgrim. For instance,
the poem with the wonderful opening title, “There Were
the Signs,” begins, “Seeking New England’s
wisdom, I turn to Robert Frost.” Contextualizing the
poem from Morgan’s Point in Connecticut, the poem addresses
the “Mother…back home in Kentucky.” In fact,
even as the speaker’s imagination has her considering
the ruins of Urquhart Castle and the mountains of Scotland,
or the ancestors of Papago (the Hohokan), it finally ends
with the legacy—the good and bad—of what her hardboot
mother left her with. This is not to say that Shipley’s
subjects never stray from Kentucky. They do often enough.
It is safe to say, however, that they rarely stray from the
complex strands of familial relationships. For instance, in
“Loon” the speaker is clearly contextualized at
Morgan’s Point, and considers the loons—first
because of “needing to feel superior to something,”
she laughs at them, but later as she analyzes herself and
the difficulty of being both a mother and a mother-in-law,
she draws an extended comparison to the loons, seeing them
as “mute like me, but / only for half the year. After
six months of being quiet, these birds who are not afraid
to disturb the surface have / a lot to say, calling to each
other at any time of night / or day.” She ends up envying
“the loon its tremulous wails, eerie yodel / laughter,
screams that are counterpoint to my silence.” By the
end, the poem has shifted from delight to wisdom—as
Frost said poems should—as she surmises that unlike
the loons:
I can learn to sing in combination with my to create
harmony. All sharps or flats, I shifted into minor key.
Collectively, however, the poems in Hardboot hit a clean,
high register. Shipley’s specifics and sounds ring in
the mind long after the book has been put down. Her often
unexpected but persuasive turns toward ever more detail, more
revelation; her closures deeply reward and often surprise.
Shipley’s work reclaims ordinary life by finding value
or lessons from the lives she probes. What she finally accomplishes
is to create a human community without drowning out her own
distinct voice. Her concern with memory and family history
will surely cause readers to remember people who have been
forgotten. Hardboot is necessary, has profound things to say
about the lives of ordinary people, and continually lifts
off into wider, universal implications because of how grounded
the narratives are in the landscape of the particular.
teaches at Lee University as Assistant Professor of Creative
Writing and Rhetoric. He has work currently in print in South
Carolina Review, Rosebud, and Puerto Del Sol.
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