The Shadow-Tamer

The title poem of this collection, The Shadow Tamer reveals that it is only by confronting the shadows of the past, which darken all our lives, that one can overcome them. Although memory has the power to hurt, it can also have the power to heal. Facing up to the darker aspects of our lives can make us feel more alive and know what is to be fully human. In the closing stanza of this sonnet, we read:

Through the memory of my deceased husband,

I grew receptive to the immediacy

of love. Attuned to my heart-beat, I felt alive.

The act of writing poetry can be a powerful instrument in the taming of shadows and the sensitive reader can find a form of healing in engaging with such poems.

In his profound novel, The Go-Between, LP Hartley states that: The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. The strangeness of the past enters into the strangeness of our dreams and dreams recur throughout this collection. The loved dead stalk through our dreams: it is through that mysterious medium that they return to us with such startling clarity, however fleetingly. In the poem appropriately entitled, Regain, we read:

. . . my husband and I,

gradually reclaimed our lost bodies

but were forever lost again.

In a series of poems about the Son of Man, one of poems is entitled Purification by Water and the cleansing power of water recurs throughout the Gospels as images of the sea recur throughout this collection. Long before the birth of Christ, it was the tragic dramatist of ancient Greece, Euripides, who wrote that: the sea washes clean all the evils of men. The ebb and flow of the tides can also evoke memories and enhance their surging power through the mind.

There is also a series of poems dedicated to TS Eliot and one recalls Eliot’s line in The Dry Salvages: the stillness between two waves of the sea. That moment of stillness is a recovery of balance, or poise, when love and loss are held together and transformed into something beautiful in the poet’s cupped hands. The poem called Poised ends with this delicate act of balance:

I discern a pale petal

on the white page to keep

his heart in mine poised

James Knox Whittet, former President of Suffolk Poetry Society