Angela Shaw, “April”

is all lace and boudoir. She reclines, wigless
and half-naked in the haze of her private
rooms, chain smoking, deflowering éclair
with furtive tongue, bemoaning the pinch
of her little miss shoes. She is more freckled
than is suspected, less young, and when the mouth
of her silk robe unfolds, it confesses
her dimpled skin, the lap of rich thigh
on rich thigh. She jiggles her clinky
bottles, sips at her tinctures, weeping
easily over this hidden toilette, burnt
curl, slipped hem, the short, huffy cough
of powder puff. Her muttered curses are coarse
as grosgrain as she totters in corset
and stockings, rehearsing protocol, her self-
mocking curtsy. But she clears like water and later
will deny you saw her or knew her as she
litters with lipstick imprints spring’s cotillion.

The Begining of the Fields is the debut collection of Angela Shaw’s poetry. Several other poems had been published in Poetry: “After Sleep the Wild Morning,” “Crepuscle,” “Miscarriage,” and “The Beginning of the Fields.” Another poem, “Children in a Field,” was featured in Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry column, and you can hear Shaw read from others at the PS Voices website, including “Barbed Wire,” “White Picket,” and “Stone Wall.”

Concerning “Children in a Field” and “The Beginning of the Fields” (and another poem, “Wheat”), Shaw told an interviewer: “I wrote the three poems that open my book while I was living in Cambridge, Massachusetts but longing for the landscape of my childhood. I turned to the work of Fairfield Porter—his Long Island landscapes—as a source of inspiration for my writing. I was reassured, too, in my reading about Porter, to learn that he had turned down a teaching post in Carbondale, IL, because, as he put it ‘there was nothing to paint.’ I imagine that for other artists there would have been plenty to paint in Carbondale—but not for Porter. Somehow that anecdote gave me permission to forgo using a visual vocabulary that wasn’t comfortably my own at that time.”

10 April 2011 | uncategorized |