Shadow Selves By Deb Matthews-Zott, Charnwood: Ginninderra Press, 2003, 70 pages, paperback, $16.00. Reviewed by Ali Alizadeh in the September 2004 issue. Help more readers find out about this article
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In his 1967 essay 'Words and Experience', English poet Ted Hughes highlights the limitations of language in general, and poetry in particular, in representing the complexities of human experiences. He begins by saying that words are inadequate tools, 'learned late and laboriously and easily forgotten' and, to overcome these shortcomings, he draws on a number of psychoanalytical perspectives -- primarily Jungian -- to conclude that 'occasionally ... just for a brief moment' the poet can, almost accidentally it seems, find the words that actually succeed in capturing and reanimating the 'spirit' of the human condition.
A belief in a separation between life and art, and, in this case, between experience and poetry, is nothing new and goes back, at leat according to Western understandings, to Aristotle's distinction between praxis and mimesis. While Hughes does not challenge the terms of this dichotomy, he does voice the particularly modern view that mythos -- in this case 'words'; as opposed to any argument or 'message' the text may attempt to convey -- is the crucial, structural and instrumental term in the creation of a work of art. It is, in other words, the functions (or, in Hughes' case, the dysfunctions) of language that seem to be of primary importance; and the process by which the poet chooses her words -- what Seamus Heaney might call 'technique' -- is presented as an arbitrary, if not mysterious, 'spiritual' thing.
Such an emphasis on language per se is one of the trademarks of a good deal of modern, modernist and post-modernist literatures and literary theories. The subject of this review seems to be no exception.
In spite of the Jungian-sounding title, the collection begins with a strikingly post-structuralist manifesto ('A Poet's Self-Defence') declaring that the author's identity is not autobiographical and not a faithful representation of reality but, as Roland Barthes may have had it, 'an adventure of language': I am not the 'I' in these poems.
I am merely a figure of speech
A voice in a poem -- the unwritten 'I' who writes. Unlike Hughes, however, who would find the 'merely a figure of speech' quality an insufficiency of the poetic language, Matthews-Zott develops a lively and complex discourse from the assumption that words cannot really 'get to the bottom' of things; that they cannot express or project real feelings and arguments but instead describe and/or evoke visceral events or 'facts'; and that, as 'merely speech' they are, if incapable of the sort of transcendental 'shamanism' preferred by Hughes' poetry, then capable of possessing the world of the physical and narrating immediate, reflexive actions and sensations.
As a result of what I believe to be the central paradigm of Shadow Selves -- a predilection for the visceral and the immediate over the emotional and the reflective -- the poems in this collection are formed through an unemotional, stark and relatively objective voice that, interestingly enough, almost explicitly deals with hypersensitive, very subjective and emotionally-charged themes and subject matters.
In the poem 'Red', for example, the subject of the poem is an alcoholic woman's reunion with her abusive partner. Here, instead of passing a judgement on these characters, moralising or expressing any other ethos for that matter, the poet describes the physical scene and notes only what is seen and heard: The street could not contain
The riot of her voice;
Her stumbling red shape
Her bare feet on their bitumen road. Here Matthews-Zott successfully avoids being either mawkish or judgmental; choosing, instead, to evoke and eroticise the experiences without getting tangled up in the emotions that accompany these conventionally 'romantic' themes. This modernist approach -- 'showing' instead of 'telling' -- can be observed in a good deal of contemporary poetry; but at times in Matthews-Zott's writing it results in a refreshingly profound and searching discourse that undermines its limitations.
In representing sexual experience, for example, there is a clear distinction between 'sensing' and 'feeling': while the narrator's lover often provides for a sensual experience -- 'Hot --/ the smell of him [...] his hunter's breath/ stalking my throat' in 'Home from the Hunt' or 'When he was inside me,/ I sensed movement' in 'Slipping Out' -- the poet rarely expands her feelings beyond an instantaneous, impulsive response. In the latter piece, even a most traditionally emotional theme such as being abandoned by one's beloved is reduced to a sensory experience towards the poem's end:The separation;
Sensation of shoulders slipping out
Of me, the dark cavity
The ache. This piece, as with most of this collection's poems, ends precisely at the point where the visceral descriptions ('Sensation') are about to spread out into a perhaps more emotional territory -- 'the dark cavity', 'The ache'. In other words, each discourse is terminated exactly at the point where it could transform from 'merely a figure of speech'; at the point where, as Hughes may have, something of their subject matter's 'spirit' could be communicated.
In 'The W(h)ishing of Rain' after eloquently describing the image of a morning rain, Matthews-Zott travels back in time to become, for the moment, a child again; and the poem is over. In 'The Body Is a Temple (A poem for two voices)' the poet relates a number of misogynist and moralistic religious doctrines being preached by a pastor -- e.g. 'Sexual immorality is sin', 'Use your body to honour God' -- before concluding by a description of her knee-jerk reaction: Me neck hair rises again;
I rise with it
from my uncomfortable seat,
leave by the back the door. Instead of responding to or arguing against the seemingly fearsome authority, the narrator walks away from it; a reaction that could be seen as a classic case of psychological repression. This observation is not so much a criticism of Matthews-Zott's poetry as it is an acknowledgment of her ability to show the nuances of the modern psyche and, indeed, address the resulting 'shadow selves'; for beneath the seemingly cerebral, clinical and post-structuralist surface of these poems, lie the 'shadows' that seem to have resulted from repression and denial of feelings.
To this reviewer the most successful of this collection's poems deal precisely with the limitations of the modern idiom; with the frustrations produced by an approach that, fundamentally, prevails 'showing' over 'telling', 'sensing' over 'feeling'. In 'Hail', for example, the poem's female protagonist shows her male counterpart her various physical attributes -- 'auburn hair in loose wet coils', 'Her breasts, through the sweater', etc -- but failing to 'connect' with the other, 'all she can do is kneel at his feet'.
In 'Penelope Sailing', a fascinatingly introspective rendition of the myth, after condemning a lonely life devoted to 'work[ing] the loom,/ and ply[ing] the yarn/ to finish a fabric/ which represents our lie', tells Odysseus 'I've had it', and sails away from Ithaca. In many ways this poem could summarise the attitudes displayed by the poet herself throughout this insightful collection: poems that represent the 'lie' of reality only further contribute to alienation. To weave poems that are not just reiterating the experiences in words -- no matter how provocative or erudite -- would require a complete detachment or, what the Sufis might call, Annihilation of the Self, and not knee-jerk acts of denial. As the poet herself admits in a rare moment of spiritual candour in 'Baptism', what she wants is: to stand between heaven and earth
and give birth to herself. It would be interesting to see if Matthews-Zott succeeds in achieving this ambitious project in her future collections. Citation - Ali Alizadeh. 'Review: Shadow Selves by Deb Matthews-Zott' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), September 2004. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 30 July 2010].
Back Cover Blurb - 'Shadow Selves draws the reader into the psychic and emotional tussle of contemporary lives. Some of the poems pant with sexual tension. Others ache with frustration and loss. The poetry is always intensely physical'. - Jeri Kroll, PhD
'It is poetically satisfying when gutsy is elegant and outspoken is gentle, when the snake nerve writhes with realisation so that wonder is reborn accompanied by the music of new knowledge, by the rewards of a past paid for and a future fortified. The maturity of these poems, combined with the poet's belief in the redemptive power of poetry, is a cause for celebration, mutually, between the poet and her readers. At the core of Deb Matthews-Zott's impressive collection is a true voice of feeling'. -Syd Harrex
'The poet frees her characters from herself and her shadow. Even so, they remain her characters - hers or her shadow's'. - Graham Rowlands
Have You Also Read? Cut to the Word
 Tim Metcalf, Charnwood: Ginninderra Press, 2002, 64 Pages, Paperback, $18.00Reviewed by Sue Bond in the June 2003 issue.It feels like a punch, that's all. We all say that when we're knifed in the heart. Our body's just a punching bag. One stab is fatal most times, but everyone in this poem survived. All of us were badly hurt. (from 'The heart: a knife in every chamber', p 12)This first poem of Tim Metcalf's is clever and robust. It is divided, like the heart, into four chambers, dealing with three injured patients in casualty, and the doctor himself, wounded in a different way. We immediately know the personal aspect of the doctor's work, that he is not an automaton stitching up and resuscitating, but a fellow human being who gets disillusioned, saddened, bitter and pained by his work and the people he ... read more.
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Issue 44
Popular Music: Practices, Formations and Change - Australian Perspectives
