Karen Hildebrand
Review: “It Will Have Been So Beautiful” by Amanda Shaw
Where to begin when your topics span an impossibly wide range, from self and family to environmental disaster and climate change? If you’re Amanda Shaw, you jump right in and introduce it all within your first six poems (Section I, “What They Said it Was”), creating a map of where your reader will travel. Shaw’s debut collection, It Will Have Been So Beautiful, begins with a childhood in New Hampshire, and ventures as far as Italy, France, and the Swiss Alps, passing points of literary and cultural interest such as Telemachus of mythic ancient Greece and Mark Rudd of anti-war protests in the 1960s. The speaker chats with us along the way, often spontaneously wandering off-road. Shaw is like a tour guide who recommends getting lost in order to appreciate where we have arrived. What may seem a digression intentionally builds a deeper take on the topic at hand.
There are five sections in all, each titled with delightful ambiguity. In section II, “This is Not a Bowl,” we enter the speaker’s past—both individual and ancestral. The poem that shares the section title riffs on the famous Magritte artwork, “Ceci N’est Pas une Pipe,” and the idea that what we perceive as an object (the pipe) is not the object at all, but a representation (as good a description as any for the concept of image in poetry). In this case, a silver bowl draws wildly different asking prices, depending on who is offering it for sale. The bowl not only represents the object resting on her mother’s table, it is a repository of family history (“With all that went on, my mother asks, who kept it safe?”). I can’t help but hear an echo of the proverbial half-empty glass in the line, “Our bowl has always been empty.”
Ceci N’est Pas un Bol
A woman in Italy is selling the bowl
on my mother’s table. An auction house
in Dallas has a set of three, on sale
for thousands less, 19th Century Bowls
in Classic Clover Pattern—they live
in a warehouse (or on a screen):
the clover is hard to see. Our clover lives
on my mother’s marble table (not mine,
it’s glass). These Classic Bowls,
they must be full
of untold memories, not mine.
Our bowl has always been empty,
polished but tarnished
where the slender vines entwine;
The poet’s precise diction and internal rhyme threads through the poem, (bowl/untold; vine/entwine/not mine) much the way of the vines engraved on the physical bowl. A description of the bowl leads to an anecdote about the Semper Augustus tulip, a species infected with a virus that weakens the bulb so that its genetic line dies off. This may seem unrelated, but it doesn’t take a Google search to find a shared border between speaker and diseased tulip.
… Tiffany Tulips
in favrile glass, petals rimmed in lead, adorn
museum windows; you can buy
reproductions in shops. The Semper
Augustus, however, is gone:
speculators named it “always,”
then killed the species off.
I’ve never been to Dallas; Italy
was years ago. Clover grows here,
among wild grasses, but not
our Clover, it’s silver. “Serving Bowl”
the Italian calls hers, praising
its preserved curves, its patina;
to me, refractions just look like glare.
Whoever wanted it
to be a “Bowl”? I want only
the way it used to hold the porous light
of winter afternoons…
The physical bowl may be empty, but as a metaphor, this bowl contains the entire poem. It’s physical structure on the page is also a container. The lines are organized into box-like stanzas of four lines, generally each four-beats long. The lines are arranged in a way that pulls a reader down the page, each line ending with a slight pause before continuing its thought. It’s like gradually pouring soup to fill a bowl. The repetition of certain words (bowl and clover, for example, which call attention to the “o” sound they share) serves to blend the broth.
With Section III, simply titled, “Design,” Shaw jumps fully into her concerns of environmental disaster, leading with a wonderfully odd epigraph from F. Reichel, gardener and prisoner at Alcatraz: “I kept no record of my failures, for I had many. The main thing was to assure some success by trying many things and holding on to the plants, which had learned that life is worth holding on to even at its bitterest.” In “You Don’t Need a Weatherman,” a stream on the family property is no longer cooled by the shade of the old forest, now cleared. The title refers to Mark Rudd of the Weather Underground, and the poem manages to associate Homer’s Telemachus with a landfill in New Jersey, as well as the speaker’s childless state with Brigitte Bardot’s failing beauty. (You might want to keep that search tab open as you read.)
The striking “Allegory of the Fish,” looks like a traditional poem, lineated as it is into tercets, but it’s more of an essay, delivered in prosaic lines. As an allegory, it’s a red herring, its meaning far from hidden. The tainted water really is the drinking water of Flint, Michigan, and the danger of pharmaceutical and microplastics poisoning is plainly stated. What makes it poetry? The poem demonstrates that you don’t need stats or quotes or Socratic argument to convince a skeptic. Conjuring distress or anguish in a reader will do the trick.
… we’re all drinking
something that’ll kill us
microplastics arseniphosphate chlor-
insectipesticide, which reminds me I think it’s weird
the French call weeds mauvaises herbes, “bad grasses”:
it seems les botanistes neglected to ask the honeybees
and pretty soon it’ll be too late. At first I didn’t understand
how antidepressants would make the poor Great-Lake-shrimp
suicidal: turns out Prozac led them toward the light
where it just so happens their predators hang out. But back
down in the weeds I’m thinking any bee would tell the French
Don’t blame the damn plants:
And speaking of bees, Shaw invokes them memorably in Section IV’s “Dance, Dance, Evolution.” (Ever try that video arcade game that requires you to move your feet according to a changing pattern of lights on an electronic dance floor?)
The so-called waggle dance
confused me at first,
why above her honeycomb a bee
will move for up to one hundred circuits,
wagging her pointy rump
in a perfect figure 8: I thought
the dancer was pointing
to the honey already in the comb;
didn’t understand
why the other bees would care.
In nine stanzas of eight lines each, one of the longer poems in the book, Shaw frames a debate over why the bees dance. Is it social, or is it for survival? A lighthearted tone effectively mirrors our denial over what’s at stake. The poem is joyful and, as such, reminds me of a familiar guilt: How can we possibly enjoy this pleasure while the world is going to hell?
humans, we can’t help ourselves,
we’ll eat whatever honey
we can get, then run in circles at the gym.
I have to, anyway; last time I danced instinctively
the boys all laughed
and I sat back down. So it’s a comfort
to hear there’s a dance out there
to save a race from doom,
but wouldn’t you know? even the waggle
is up for debate: some swear
it’s olfactory factors, not mystic rites
that will rescue the species
from the Varroa mite.
The final section V takes us home with “Far from New Hampshire,” and to some of Shaw’s finest writing. Throughout the book, she uses a conversational tone, occasionally throwing in slang or a swear word, yet without compromising her impressive vocabulary. These final poems take a somber turn. They pulse with the ache of love, whether for another person, or all of planetary life. In “The Old Man and the Hills” the speaker comes to an understanding, if not forgiveness, for her father, whose abandonment haunts the book. In “Ashes, Ashes” she plays “Ring Around the Rosie” with children and their mother after a day of collecting shells and sand dollars on the beach. These lines capture a sense of generational responsibility so well:
we’re spinning, the earth is too
and now with glee We all fall
down! —small wet butts in cool wet sand,
in my heavy pockets skeletons like stars.
It’s not until the final poem, “Where We Are,” that the meaning of the book’s enigmatic title sinks in. The speaker is at The Whitney, standing in front of a painting of a Pittsburgh steel mill, a subject the artist Elsie Driggs states she did not consider beautiful. “And it was all I had, so I drew it.” That’s what Shaw has accomplished. She has rendered what she’s been given—quite a compendium of human experience—with tenderness, wry wit, and crystal clarity. And it is quite beautiful.
Karen Hildebrand
Karen Hildebrand is the author of Crossing Pleasure Avenue (Indolent Books) and she writes about dance for Fjord Review, The Brooklyn Rail, and the Jacobs Pillow Dance Festival podcast. Recent poems appear in Defunct, LEON, Maintenant, No Dear, Pigeon Pages, Poetry Bay, Quarter After Eight, Scoundrel Time, Slipstream, South Florida Poetry Journal, Trailer Park Quarterly, and Braving the Body, an anthology forthcoming from Harbor Editions. She holds an MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Originally from Colorado, she lives in Brooklyn.