Greeny News

The president of the Poetry Society talks to Sarah Crown

Jo Shapcott has an ear for a title. From the jaunty clank of Electroplating the Baby via Phrasebook 's knowing wink to the pointed throat-clearing of 2000's Her Book, she's one of poetry's great encapsulators, able to set the tone of a collection with a choice word or two. "I like titles," she says with a grin, over coffees in a rackety West End café. "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."

Which is why, when Shapcott unveiled her latest collection, fans knew that something was up. Of Mutability, which was shortlisted this week for the Forward prize, is her first book in almost a decade, and while the title is no less plangent than those that preceded it, an audible tonal shift has occurred; the preposition "of" creates a gap between poet and poem, introducing a new note of reticence. It's lower-pitched than before: less pert, more pensive.

This is a shift of which Shapcott herself is acutely aware â€" and she's in no doubt about its origins. In May 2003, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, and underwent the "full gamut" of treatment (her oncology team are named in Of Mutability's acknowledgments). The process took almost a year, and was deemed, in the cautious terms of cancer medicine, to have been a success. But the remedy left its own scars. During the course of her treatment, Shapcott found herself facing "not only physical changes, which were quite profound, but mental and emotional ones". It was, she says, "like being reborn as someone slightly different. And in my case, that meant not only finding out who I was now â€" this new, wobbly person â€" but how that person wrote. The distinctive thing about breast cancer is that you're not cured, you're only ever in remission. You become aware that the body is going in one direction: towards  disintegration. That's true for all of us, of course â€" but now it's at the front of my mind, and that means living with a changed sensibility. I've had to carry out reconstruction on my brain. I've had to remake myself as a poet."

Tender Taxes

They do. Although Shapcott succeeded in its previous incarnation, took the prize ahead in 1999, his third collection, My Life Asleep, and becoming the only poet to win the National Poetry Competition twice, there's a hard-won maturity to her latest poems, coupled with a new and deep attentiveness, that lifts them above anything she has so far written. In former collections, she took vital pleasure in inserting herself into multiple personae, from Marlon Brando to Elizabeth Barrett Browning to her famous "Mad Cow" of the early 90s (best line: "I love the staggers"), switching masks with such enthusiasm that Michael Hofmann, writing in the Times, said of her that "once in disguise . . . pressed into other skins and other perspectives, she howls and sings". In Of Mutability, though, the howling is quieted. These poems, which are as full of greenery and music and fresh air as they are of hospitals and hair loss, are briefer, breathier; their edges, often acid-sharp in previous books, have relaxed and spread. "Look further into the stands of trees / and everything changes", she says in the lovely, lilting "Viral Landscape", in which the collection's themes of physical uncertainty, and the glad embrace of it, are exemplified. "The eye // can't locate an individual shade: / it's all delicate tips and hints / of green rolling in the wind. / We are moving and I can't see a thing."

Shapcott was born in London in 1953 â€" a year she describes in a poem from her debut collection as "myopic . . . full of the coronation illusion". That poem â€" written in the first person and describing events that, Shapcott allows, happened to her infant self â€" raises the question of autobiography, which, for better or worse, hovers over her poetry right up to the present day. "There's a mixture of autobiography and imagination in the poems that I don't quite understand myself," she says, although the suggestion that she might occasionally have dipped a toe into confessional waters is given very short shrift. "Not at all. No. No!" she shudders, laying the blame squarely at the readers' door. "It seems to me that readers tend to relate poems to poets in a way that they don't with novels. And yet poets and novelists share the same dynamic: we make stuff up; we move the point of view around. In Of Mutability, for example, the reader doesn't get an account of my experience with breast cancer. I'm not an autobiographical poet in that sense; I'm not someone chasing her own ambulance. But what you do get is a series of meditations imbued with mortality and mutability, coming from the body, or from the boundaries between the body and the world. The poems are emotionally autobiographical, but not factually so. The 'I' is no more and no less me than it ever was."

A poem towards the end of the collection, balefully entitled "Procedure", handily illustrates her point. In it, the speaker tells of how the heady scent of a cup of almond tea takes her (we presume her) back with a Proustian jerk to "the yellow time / of trouble, with blood tests, and cellular madness, and my presence required // on the slab for surgery". Reading the poem, knowing of her illness, I casually elided the gap between speaker and poet; when I let this slip, she pulls me up. "It shows how complicated the whole business is. When I wrote that poem I wasn't thinking of myself â€" I was imagining the experience of somebody else. In fact, in the first draft, I had a detailed abdominal operation. It really wasn't about me at all."

If her poems aren't precisely autobiographical, though, one can see how her life has guided their focus. When Shapcott was young, her parents left London for Hemel Hempstead, where she grew up, an "unnaturally compulsive reader", quietly doing well at school, and writing her first poems. A pleasantly unexceptional childhood ended abruptly at the age of 18, when both of her parents died suddenly â€" her mother of cancer, her father of a heart attack a month later. Shapcott doesn't court sympathy for this early orphaning ("think how much worse it would have been if I'd been 17, or 16 . . . ") but acknowledges that "a lot of things emerged around that time â€" I guess primarily my interest in the body, its edges, its weaknesses".

Immediately after the death of her parents, she left England for Ireland, heading to Trinity College Dublin to read English. Leaving home for a foreign country so soon after a double bereavement might have been expected to deepen her grief; on the contrary, she says, it was "such a piece of luck in so many ways. The city opened its arms and looked after me in a way that an English city probably wouldn't have done. Everyone from my landlady to my tutors metaphorically cuddled me." One of those tutors was the poet Brendan Kennelly; after Trinity, Shapcott went to Harvard on a Harkness fellowship and studied under Seamus Heaney. While the experience of being taught by such figures was uplifting, it also, temporarily, put the kibosh on any poetic efforts of her own. Not until she was back in the UK, working as an arts administrator at the Southbank Centre, did the poetry begin to resurface. At the time she was a member of a workshop that met at the Lamb pub in Lamb's Conduit Street, and which has since become famous for launching a generation of poets: Don Paterson, Ruth Padel, Matthew Sweeney, Vicki Feaver and Michael Donaghy, among others. "It was quite something," she remembers. "I still show poems to people in that group, though our work is very different; I wouldn't call us a school, as some people have tried to. It's always been the case that poets make great efforts to see each other and talk about poetry â€" Wordsworth had to walk a long way over the hills to do it; we have workshops instead." Her life as a poet seems to be one of deep immersion punctuated by brief surfacings for gulps of air. "It's an odd but very interesting existence. It demands a lot of solitude: to write, I need to be by myself with a towel wrapped round my head. But that makes it far more intense when you do go out and exchange ideas."

Shapcott won the National Poetry Competition for the first time in 1985, for the uproarious "The Surrealists' Summer Convention Came to Our City", and Electroplating the Baby, her first collection, was published in 1988. It was at this point that she began the process of easing over from full-time arts administrator to full-time poet. "I loved working at the Southbank Centre but it was very full-on. It became clear very quickly that it was going to be difficult to sustain both things. Eventually, I jumped into formal teaching." Shapcott is now a professor of creative writing at Royal Holloway, but she began in Newcastle, where she was a visiting professor at the school of English literature in 2001. This allowed her to write a series of lectures on poetry's relationship with the world, due to be published as The Transformers later this year; and she also discovered, in the city, "a brilliant centre of poetry. It was a very exciting time to be up there. Linda Anderson created an amazing department. You'd go down the corridor and see this wonderful litany of names on the doors â€" WN Herbert, Sean O'Brien, Linda France, Julia Darling . . . "

The friendships she fostered during her time at Newcastle proved just as important. O'Brien, who says of Shapcott that she's "an original in contemporary poetry â€" she comes at traditional subject matter as if she's entered the room through a different door", has remained a colleague and valued early reader. And before she died from breast cancer in 2005, Julia Darling offered support of a different kind. "Julia was a great friend to me when I was diagnosed," Shapcott says. "She was always quite jaunty about it, which was an inspiration. She'd write emails saying things like 'drink green tea and eat kiwi!'." At the end of her treatment, Shapcott, like Darling, was prescribed tamoxifen. "Millions of women all over the world take it," Shapcott explains, "and Julia and I were talking about it one day and had a sudden epiphany: an image of all of these women taking this white pill every morning, at the same time. It was a collective act of faith. So we elevated it into a goddess; she became the Goddess Tam."

The female experience â€" what it means, where it fits â€" has always mattered to Shapcott. In Tender Taxes, when she reimagines Rilke's series of rose-poems as being overtly about women ("and more than that â€" petal â€" space â€" petal â€" . . . versions of female genitalia"), she gave the roses their own voice, explaining in her introduction that the poems raised, for her, the question of "who's doing what to whom. And . . . how does a woman poet relate to the poets who have gone before?". Her favourite of all her titles is Her Book, which is, she says, "to do with being a woman in a male poetic tradition. The idea was just to say, OK, this is her book." In Of Mutability, meanwhile, the female body becomes the plain on which many of the poems are enacted. The "presiding spirit of the collection" is, she explains, the artist Helen Chadwick. "I was commissioned by the Barbican to write some poems in response to her work, just when I was finishing my treatment. Her take on gender was fascinating: her work suggested ways of relating the body and the world, which at that moment spoke to me, opened windows and doors, opened the whole house up."

If her poetry has opened up over the past seven years, the rest of life has, too. She was made president of the Poetry Society in 2005 and has found time to indulge her long-held interest in science: the critic Edna Longley, in relation to Shapcott's work, has talked of "the zone where poetry and science meet". Shapcott is now studying for an OU degree in the subject. "Any distinctive language interests me, whether it's that of football or knitting, but scientific language is very beautiful. Each word opens a world. And scientists need metaphor to describe things that they don't fully understand yet."

It feels at times as if her latest collection is performing a similar action. The poems are a groping towards an understanding of her new life, her changed self. Of the ways in which her writing has altered, she says: "I think that's going to be for other people to identify. I just feel very glad that it began again. It's characteristic for people who've been through chemo to experience a sense of euphoria at the end, and that was certainly true in my case: I felt like Dennis Potter when he was talking about the blossomy-ness of the blossom. So when I talk about writing out of a new self, it's not a smaller, more negative self â€" it's uncontrollable, sometimes ecstatic. Even though many of the poems here are concerned with decay and death, they're often cheerful. I guess 'mutability' is the right word for it all. It's rather a wonderful word. I like it because there's no value judgment in it: it suggests that change is glinting and gleaming, whichever way it's going. I think that's what I feel, too."