The human tendency to categorize, organize, and compartmentalize life events and occurrences is a strong instinct. This doesn’t necessarily mean that everything has the capacity to fit into tidy, symmetrical spaces. Still, it also doesn’t mean humans will cease searching for signs, predictions, and answers along the way. Amanda Shaw’s debut collection, It Will Have Been So Beautiful, captures the waltz that humans dance with themselves, others, and nature at large. Shaw aptly excavates the beauty that lies underneath and exists despite human atrocities, destruction, and hatred. People can try to rationalize these actions, alongside completing chores and making grocery lists, but this will not reduce the multiplication of human fears and sorrows experienced. What will soothe this existential suffering, though, is nurturing curiosity alongside the acknowledgment that beauty can still be observed and unearthed, even in the darkest of times. One has to be willing to find “the flap in my mind / that opens to this odd sentence / like the flap in the pop-up book” and to witness and welcome that “late-season bees / drowsing and curious / mean a grandchild is going to cry”. By cultivating a keen sense of perception and an emotional awareness, readers can also tap into the powers of embracing life events vs. steering away from tribulations.
Shaw is quick to warn the reader that these potential casualties she describes aren’t only of the larger scale, societal variety; they likewise exist in personal terms and venues. The first section titled, “What They Said It Was,” spotlights the questions surrounding definitions of home, exploration, and progress. Shaw’s ability to begin a section or a poem in a lighthearted manner, and propel the reader onward, gathering momentum and depth along the way, is subtle and masterful. In one instance, the poem, “Ensconced,” moves from the Pottery Barn catalog to flameless candles to settlers heading West who “built a road to everywhere / to arrive at the lightbulb.” “Now, progress / is the end of a time zone echoing / a man hailing the bus.” Then the reader travels along to experience the “plangent chords, the five o’clock shadow / at the closed window” to “a naked beach in a storm,” “a ledge of resonant sea,” and “the careless fluorescence / of his gaze.” All the while landing on “The soft glow, the carpeted fall” and yet, beneath it all, the speaker concludes: “I want back that girl / with nothing more than to love.” One can tell a story through details in a logical sequence of events, or in Shaw’s style of placing juxtaposing images, sounds, and vignettes, that butt against, scratch at, and clash with each other, while simultaneously achieving the smooth rise and fall of a waltz.
It is in these world-building movements where Shaw likewise shines. The reader is immersed and submerged into the depths of ekphrastic pieces. They are forced “to listen to what / I wouldn’t hear if speaking / and think of all I’ve left unsaid, to hope / that one of these quarter-hours / I might unseal myself.” Travel, foreign languages, and blending into the surrounding environs have entombed the speaker, thrusting her into a meditative state. This transition brings motion and clarity, allowing her to embark upon a path of self-discovery. The more abstract elements of these poems are grounded in frame stories that tie themselves to a fixed surface or experience. For example, in “A Peaceable Kingdom,” the speaker begins, “Let’s go where May tadpoles / turn to June crickets keening / the starlight glimmering...I mean the country / where we used to live...before winters too warm / for what used to be May.” This introductory scene paves the way and scaffolds the poem as the speaker reflects on her father’s recreation of Hicks’ painted version with the same title, as well as her later contemplations as the climate and country are seemingly falling apart. There is a cycle at hand here, but also it’s worth noting that Hicks painted sixty-two renditions of his famous painting. Perhaps humans and artists alike are ultimately doomed to continue a similar pattern of tirelessly recreating and reimagining the world, as well as their relationships.
Shaw’s love of language, its evolutionary nature, and its elliptical path is evident throughout the collection, but is particularly emphasized in the second section, “This is Not a Bowl.” There is a true sense of the “evidence of nerdity” as the speaker is “furiously digging into my mind like I always do for / more words, more words / to supplement the more words that didn’t work the first time.” Ekphrastic verses, allusions to paintings, language, philosophy, literature, and opera are all right at home here in this section, as Shaw investigates what survives and is preserved, and what has value. Magritte is called to mind here as the aforementioned is a bowl and also not confined to the limits imposed upon itself by merely being known as bowl. The speaker asserts: “I want only / the way it used to hold the porous light / of winter afternoons.” Objects and people contain multitudes and they hunger for limitless ways to express their emotions, hypotheses, discoveries, recollections. There is subtlety and restraint in Shaw’s depictions of the complexities of the human experience, as she is not quick to cast judgement or posit definite conclusions. There often aren’t additional words or descriptors that suffice to expand upon the depth of meaning contained within the lines: “down a hall of angry phonemes / Fox calls news...she lives, / my mother lives, at one of the good ones.” In another instance, the speaker remarks on seeing the world through the eyes of a child in the poem, “Ruthie’s Art”: “…whole planets hula or twirl / to whichever off-beat you choose.”
This movement continues in lines that recall edges and softness, imploring the reader to “Run your hands / along the corrugated surface. Life / has never been delicate.” Additionally, “Soon, edges will thin out, soften,” as there are “ebbing waves” and “skeletons like stars” in the worlds that Shaw creates. There is a profound simplicity in the process of borders and margins losing their rigidity and making space for rounded corners, in their efforts to become malleable and pliable. There are reciprocal transformations that can occur as one can move back and forth between these states of being, rather than stagnating in polar opposition. How much more colorful, complex, and ultimately beautiful would the world be if more people observed the everyday as Shaw does, basking in the grace and knowingness of it all: “I want words to be words / the way my cat wants a shifting patch of light to be a bird / she’ll never catch.”
Shannon Vare Christine is a poet, teacher, and critic living in Bucks County, PA. She is an alumnus of The Community of Writers and Tupelo Press 30/30 Project. Her poems are featured in various anthologies and publications, and her manuscript, Chrysanthemum, was a finalist for publication by The Word Works. Additionally, her poetry reviews and literary criticism were published or are forthcoming in Lily Poetry Review, The Lit Pub, Cider Press Review, Sage Cigarettes, Compulsive Reader, The Laurel Review, Vagabond City, Tupelo Quarterly, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Harbor Review, and Uirtus. Archived writing and more can be found at www.shannonvarechristine.com, her periodic newsletter, Poetic Pause, and on Instagram @smvarewrites.