Natalie Shaw
Hilary Menos reviews 'oh be quiet' by Natalie Shaw (Against the Grain, 2020)
Don’t be fooled by the sunshine yellow cover, the amusing dedication, and the throwaway humour in oh be quiet. Natalie Shaw has a serious project in mind.
Children get eaten, both hers and other people’s, and that’s just in the first poem, ‘I know you only invited me in for a coffee, but’, which is about the difficulty of managing the innate parental reaction – “I am breathing fire” – to someone being mean to your child. She says,
I am better than M. Mangetout –
Rather than, say, getting to work on a hubcap
I just swallow these things whole.
In the real world she may have swallowed the impulse to bite back, but in her poem she swallows the house. And the children. And the 4×4 – hell, why not? – even though “I cannot drive”.
Children get eaten, both hers and other people’s, and that’s just in the first poem
And the curses! In ‘Things that I say to my enemy’, she starts by wishing beetles into her enemy’s dreams and ends by cursing her with celibacy, spinsterhood and infertility.
part of the poem is omitted here
[…] I whisper
it’s true that she’ll never have boyfriends, a wedding, or babies
with soft little hands, her milk in their soft little mouths.
As bad things to wish on a person, this is major league stuff. But Shaw doesn’t just dish it out, she takes the hits as well. For the poem ‘In the changing room we see’ she turns her unflinching gaze on her own and other women’s bodies, “our different skins / our different breasts” and comes to rest on those things we so often choose to define ourselves by, “our tattoos, our piercings, our smooth thighs, our scarred tummies”. She is compassionate as well as frank, tender as well as sharp. And she is confident taking on some big themes. In ‘I have been to hell and back’ a young girl responds to the threat of sexual abuse from her uncle; the box in ‘Reality Box’ contains every scary experience you could think of:
My children’s terrible deaths
The plane collapsing through the sky
The train in the darkness
and in ‘How to tell your son he has no friends’, she deals with the business of knowing that your child is different, somehow, from other children.
You will get the first bit wrong: he won’t
be able to meet your eye. In the dark,
you can hold his hand and stroke his hair.
Forget the things you said this morning.
How does one navigate this painful process? Go back, she says,
back in the dark to see his outline,
the shape of who he is, the gap
that spools and spools around his shadow.
Tell him it’s your gap too, tell him,
tell him. Hear him breathe.
It’s a delicate, gentle resolution to a profoundly affecting poem. Less personal but equally affecting is ‘Climb through my windows, climb up my tree’, a melange of fairy tale tropes which centres on a princess.
The wolves waited under the bed. He kept them on scraps,
snickets of children and small scoops of heart. She lay down
and heard through the mattress their thoughts about hunger;
the gap in their mouths they would fill with her babies,
her once-golden crown.
Shaw looks her horrors full in the face, but often finds an original and witty way to deal with them – she also wants to keep us entertained, which is refreshing. It’s dark, quirky, and a bit anarchic.
Hilary Menos is editor of The Friday Poem.
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