When There Is No Shore (review)

Midway through her new poetry collection, When There Is No Shore, Vivian Shipley says in her poetic tribute to Charlotte Mew, "Life should not be a test of what can be endured, what can be survived." Yet every poem in the collection says otherwise. Tough-minded and unswervingly honest, these poems reverberate with irony. Even the humor is tinged with a sly darkness. Take the finale to a poem that purports to be about a son, "Praise for My Son's Photographs of Harlan County." The poem's speaker remembers hard times, juxtaposes the idealistic naiveté of the son with the grit of his forebears, and comes resolutely, dispassionately, to the poem's conclusion:

An archaeology major, you tell me how you will grow
sunflowers, live in harmony with the earth, how some caches
of seeds dating from 3000 B.C. have been found in Tennessee.
How could you know about chopping with a hoe, peas
frozen in the field, selling tires from the Ford to pay for food?
....
                  It was a hard country. People
wouldn't help bury you. If you died, you were dead. That's all.

Vivian Shipley's juxtapositions are always deft, always surprising. Perhaps it's because she is such a skilled storyteller that she knows exactly how to pace herself before she inserts her killer, deadpan, unadorned resolution, managing to make us gasp because we should have, but didn't, see it coming.

In "Sooner Was a Hard Dog to Keep Under the Porch," Shipley "eels" toward her subject, bringing us to it almost surreptitiously, putting us off-guard with phrases like her tender "You are still my father." And then we are stepping back in time after the persona informs us "your stories never/tell me what I want to know, what the photographs/cannot say about my grandfather, my grandmother." The very next line comes with its contradiction: "The story of Sooner was different." Part of the magic here comes in the poem's compression. History, hardship, the rigors of farming, and love are entwined and one remembers others who have visited this territory, poets like Robert Frost, novelists like Wallace Stegner. The scene is cinematic: "Grandma stopped sewing, put her hand on his head" and then there is a stanza break before the poem resumes, "right where she knew the bullet would go." Shipley keeps on with the detail that matters, "she used her right, the one that peeled/potatoes, kneaded dough for biscuits, the one that/Grandpa would shatter along with Sooner's skull."

But one doesn't necessarily read poetry to find a good story, and the winner of the Word Press Poetry Prize knows that too. She offers images, "My father/is thin, translucent as a shell cupped on my ear"; "I try to spear sky slivering the crosshatch/of barbed wire"; "with lines in the sweet-briar air that lift me like wings/of a monarch, your words the pollen gilding my fingers"; "darkness/grew like a cataract filming your eyes"; "It's Stephen who stands waiting for/you at Poet's Gate ... He's still bent into a harp. As ever, you yearn to touch his strings"; "Those dawns spread like/a rash."

But it is not her gift for imagery that is most remarkable. It is Vivian Shipley'sunerringcommandofvoice.Inapoemwithalongtitle,"May 17, 1720: Superior Court Justice Counsels Elizabeth Atwood in His Chambers Before Sentencing Her to Hang," we see this absolute command. There is the judge, "hiding under/branches so God would not see me ... Pressing my stomach against your spine, your breasts cupped/in my palms were better than any hope of afterlife. I fell asleep/in your bed, awakened to a gull startling me like a rusty hinge." Then Shipley does what she does so well, a scene shift: "Fog hung like a bedsheet. I was in the wrong house, could not/find my clothes, my wife." Plot unwinds. We learn that the judge has killed their illegitimate child, the death for which Elizabeth Atwood will be sentenced. The monologue...