History of the Child
Penelope Shuttle, published by Bloodaxe Books
Penelope Shuttle’s History of the Child excavates childhood in four braided sequences, where memory behaves like a dollhouse, full of strange, enchanting rooms. The cover of the collection is Ford Madox Brown’s 1863 painting Mauvais Sujet: this is apt as these poems are fascinated by the unruly girl, the “bad subject” whose appetites and rebellions disturb the house built to contain her. In one startling passage the child is “the cheek of the drawing room the heck of the chicken house,” before she “draws her first breath like a sword” and “hacks the house in half.” The comedy here is barbed, exploring girlhood as a form of domestic sabotage.
The poems are full of such quicksilver turns. Shuttle is alert to childhood as a state in which language is not yet obedient. “I wrote sorbet / I meant sonnet” is funny, but it also suggests poetry as something melting on the tongue before it hardens into form, mirroring the move from childhood to adolescence to adulthood. Elsewhere, phrases like “an eggcup-full of woo-woo juice / dropt upon her eyelid” and a “quick slurp from the drinking fountain / iron-cold potion” revel in sound’s physical pleasures with an incantatory energy. Shuttle’s sonic play –her puns, assonance and nimble near-rhymes – offer the book its fable-like charge, reminiscent of Lucille Clifton’s poetry, or Fiona Apple’s The Idler Wheel.
There are saints resurrected on the page, including Saint Catherine of Alexandria, Saint Francis, Saint Clare, and other figures and plays, too, like Caesar, Katherine of Aragon, Wallace Stevens, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The various references belong to the child’s private cosmology, where history, folklore, scripture, and dream all possess equal authority, demonstrating Shuttle’s capacious imagination.
Beneath the mischief is a real ache, though. In “Orchard End, or The Laboratory of Continuous Effort,” the speaker declares of her childhood house: “My childhood lives on there / and my parent shadows / and all my days and nights that will never bear fruit.” In “what is happiness?” the speaker’s dolly whispers that “too much happiness makes you sad anyway.” Best of all is “book of lullabies,” where she writes “lullabies / are for singing away / the evil eye” and then evidences this alchemy by morphing the phrase “Lillith begone” to “Lillith-abi” to “Lullaby.” Playful, mercurial, and poignant, Shuttle’s collection understands childhood as the first country of poetry, where language enchants, deceives, and saves us by turns.
Reviewed by Ali Choudhary.
