Helm and high water

John Kinsella on two collections bound up with gender and class, Alan Jenkins' The Drift and Jo Shapcott's Her Book

The Drift
Alan Jenkins
Chatto & Windus £8.99, pp64
Buy it at BOL

Her Book
Jo Shapcott
Faber & Faber £8.99, pp125
Buy it at BOL

In his fourth collection of poetry, The Drift, Alan Jenkins utilises well-honed prosodic skills to stabilise memory, to anchor sense in the flow of recollection. The nautical 'drift', the sea and water, are ever present, most specifically in the context of the boat, the youthful romanticism of the poetic bateau ivre struggling against the harsh truth of social necessity, the effects of time and growing middle-aged. There is something refreshingly honest about the poet's self-analysis. What is mine, what is family inheritance, who does memory belong to? But it's not as easy as that. There are possibilities of negotiating in the grey area between thought and writing, cognition and speech.

This is also poetry of class - what constitutes our social environment, or more specifically, a specific English upbringing. The love poems in this tight collection are powerful for the same reason: assessing how memory alters and recreates a relationship. They are not weighed down by sanctimonious regret.

These are really poems of self-psychoanalysis. In the elegiac 'Brighton Return', we read: 'to you he was the chosen one, the brother you'd never had'. There is a vague, suppressed sexuality at work here, but it is left aside for the safer ground of recollection. Both this and 'The Short Straw' lament the physical loss of someone once very close and the loss of personal vision. Jenkins recognises that his address to the dead is an address to what's deadened in himself.

The book exhibits the tension between the poet maudit and the 'citizen' he has become. It's this ambivalence that drives the craft, the currents moving below the surface that draw up the new, the unpredictable, that will free memory from guilt:

Your verse bobs like a little yacht
in heavy seas, dismasted, it veers and bobs and weaves
as if it were the Galatea at the mercy of great waves
as if the helmsman were unfit
(From 'Salt')

'Street Life' is almost Conradian in its resignation to the presence of darkness in the human soul - 'I paid her twenty quid and pushed it up her, dry and tight.' This is informed and learned poetry, but always available, familiar, and non-pedantic.

What links this collection and Jo Shapcott's work distinctly is the motif of gender and the environment of class. But Shapcott is an altogether different poet, doing no less than rewriting the English poetic canon - challenging sources, verse structure and the primacy of the patriarchal voice.

Shapcott has a brilliant sense of how the line can be played against to enhance meaning, to make a point about tone and speed by turning before we expect her to. Like all great satirists, she is both part of the culture she is analysing, and able to step, momentarily, outside it.

Her Book is a 'compendium' of Shapcott's three previously published books. It isn't a large oeuvre but then there is no excess. Shapcott anticipates her critics at every turn. The conflation of poetry, sexism, language, the media and even economics is brilliantly conveyed in her well-known 'Mad Cow' poems.

A small, neat poem that might be read as a mini ars poetica is 'Watching Medusa', bearing in mind Cixous's essay 'The Laugh of the Medusa'. 'Struck dumb', the Medusa-watcher tells us: 'I cannot speak or move/ in case I do wrong to her and/ close the sweet hissing mouths.' In this poem, the muse is 'rescued' - reclaimed from the male poet. The rules have changed, and whose rules were they in the first place? In a Shapcott poem, Tom and Jerry can be acting out a storyline in England - 'swished my axe at Jerry, belted after him/ into the Bloody Tower, my back legs/ circling like windmills in a gale'; nothing is sacred.

In an early poem like 'With the Big Tray', Shapcott casually deconstructs the traditional male artist's gaze. The 'nude descending the staircase' motif is inverted, and the play with gender expectation is deft and unrelenting:

The sun constructed an avenue
to the bedside table
and now the housefly played
boomerang in and out of the light.
Hilary surprised herself by breaking wind.
Secretly, her large smell
made her feel real and salty
as a merchant adventurer.

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