Flowers For Socrates

by NONA BLYTH CLOUD

Writers, including poets, use pieces of their lives in their work. Some use large pieces, some only slip in brief flashes. For some, what happened doesn’t matter, only the feelings left behind.

Jo Shapcott (1953 – ) is an English poet, editor and lecturer. She won the National Poetry Competition in 1985 and 1991. Her collections include: Electroplating the Baby (1988), which won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for Best First Collection; Phrase Book (1992); My Life Asleep (1998), which won the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Collection); and Her Book: Poems 1988-1998 (2000). She was honored with the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. Then, though she published other work during the next ten years, she stopped publishing collections of her poetry.

In a 2010 interview in The Guardian about Of Mutability, her first new book in nearly a decade, she says, “I like titles. With other people’s collections, I enjoy reading the title page as if it were a poem itself. For me, I love the process of inventing them: a lot of thought goes in, but they’re serendipitous, too. When they come, it’s a real thrill. The title is the first sense you get that maybe you’ve got a book in your hands.”

Shapcott’s favourite title from her collections is Her Book. She says it’s “to do with being a woman in a male poetic tradition. The idea was just to say, OK, this is her book.”

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Shapcott has certainly had some memorable titles:

The Mad Cow Talks Back

I’m not mad. I just seems that way
because I stagger and get a bit irritable.
There are wonderful holes in my brain
through which ideas from outside can travel
at top speed and through which voices,
sometimes whole people, speak to me
about the universe. Most brains are too
compressed. You need this spongy
generosity to let the others in.

I love the staggers. Suddenly the surface
of the world is ice and I’m a magnificent
skater turning and spinning across whole hard
Pacifics and Atlantics. It’s risky when
you’re good, so of course the legs go before,
behind, and to the side of the body from time
to time, and then there’s the general embarrassing
collapse, but when that happens it’s glorious
because it’s always when you’re travelling
most furiously in your mind. My brain’s like
the hive: constant little murmurs from its cells
saying this is the way, this is the way to go

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