Emerging from Our Shells

Shellships
by Ashlley Morgan-Shae
AMS Publishing, 2014, 99 pages, $10
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With one small qualification I’ll come to, I enjoyed this book. It comprises twenty-five pages of illustration followed by twenty-six poems, and the integration of the two art forms is most skilfully done. Indeed, if artfulness were not in its present epoch of beggary, then the exquisite watercolour illuminations of shells and marine mortuary here, together with these shapely poems, might merit being placed within a finessed sample of book-craft, hardcover, saddle-stitched, marbled endpapers and tasselled bookmark such as that quiet craftsman Alec Bolton used to create on his Brindabella Press. But the paperback we have from RMIT University Link yields a volume workaday and effective enough. In the first half of the book it displays nautilus, cone shell, seahorse, conch, each with an arresting singularity on a creamy page, while the poems that commence halfway through disclose Morgan-Shae’s commitment to the wrought-ness of verbal art, shapeliness as a presence-in-words for ear, eye and intellect.

When chanced upon at tideline or in rockpool, a seashell has a distinct power to startle. Partly this arises from the outlandishness of spikes, tiger markings, the smooth interior folding of oric or vaginal passage. Partly it is our recognition of the correspondence and contrast of these marine surfaces with our own, the coarse texture of our outward, the tender intimacy of our inward whether physique or sensibility. But a shell is hard, and is death’s leftover, while in both our flesh and our sensibility we are soft, vulnerable, alive. So the effect of these delicately brushed watercolours in Morgan-Shae’s Shellships, when juxtaposed with poems of womanly sensibility, is to establish that correspondence and contrast between our respective marine and human life-forms. For this book explores an overlap, a metaphor, a conceit. A cone-shell marks an interior from which a claw might once have jabbed, a conch shell is a chamber a sentient organism once possessed as home. Likewise will people emerge from their shell, will possess domicile, their shell wherein to dwell.

Home is a shell, a spell that we make—a speakeasy,
Rest-well, be here tomorrow.

To begin with the watercolours, most show their subjects, each in a curvaceous or horned integrity. But in one or two cases the shell has been depicted as fractured into angular shards and these form a natural correspondence with those poems that describe fracturing recollections from the past, whether parental, school, or troubled love affair.

So that I know that you are real
Come closer, reach out tentacles
Touch me! Touch me!
When it seems that all is virtual
So I know I have not made you up
When there is no safe way to feel
That though I am now spiked and rough
That you have braved to try to heal
Touch me! Touch me! 

                                   (“Feel”)

Characteristically Morgan-Shae meditates her shell/human crossover in a single verse paragraph where verbal music is made on a single rhyme, say “mollusc/dusk/sex-musk, tusk … husk” from “Mollusc”, or on the “-eed” phoneme in “Seaweed”. This fabric will be also playfully stippled with pun, image, intentness of the conceit, or a tease of dramatic monologue when it is unclear whether the mollusc speaks or the lady. Present among these verse paragraphs are also a pristine Shakespearean sonnet and another sonnet tense with internal rhyme, a rondeau and villanelle, these shapely and formal vessels from troubadour times that nonetheless allow her to exercise her argument while matching a prosody as sharply observed as the conch or cone shell her brush and pen have portrayed. Unsurprisingly she argues like a metaphysical—Donne or Traherne come to mind—the image, the passion, the argument all naturalised together. But here also is a poet who enjoys Kipling and tries the Kiplingesque jog with her own music:

Good luck, he is an illusion
The busker with holes in his clothes
Needy, seedy and feedy
Take home to love or to loathe …

Bad luck, he knows all the ways
Holds tight to the lady of hearts
Oily, soily and moily
He’s a master of amorous arts.

                                           (“Fortuny”)

These are delightful poems and I note the poet is absent from both the recent Puncher & Wattman Contemporary Australian Poetry and the Lehmann–Gray Australian Poetry since 1788. I reckon her to deserve a place in both on the basis of her facility with verbal music, with conceit, and the attenuation of intimate experience that lives in both.

My small reservation is this. The poems towards the end of the collection tend towards an airlessness where a sensibility smothers the power-of-play of the art itself. To hear in a woman’s voice the truculence, the readiness of nerve to take on the threat and harms womanhood may attract, is timely and good. But to hear this message too frequently can make the ego’s insistence upon itself suppress the ability of the art to naturalise that ego in the world of the poems.

I didn’t see teeth gnashing,
Didn’t know the vendor’s brash,
Didn’t know I was due a public lashing,
I trusted his smile and praise,
My art talents to tend.

                         (“Shell-shock”)

I must take care with this reservation. While it is true I felt a little over-exposed to a morale that was construing itself, it is also a voice with vivid and complex pain to recall, say in the relationship with a punitive father:

Stamp, Stamp, Stamp
When my father came home
Dealing bruises and cuts
I was learning no tears, but this beat

Stamping my skin, barcode of God
Burning my soul, Slap-and-tick mark
Hands tightening, like a claw-clamp…

     (“Stamp”)

So my small impatience is with the relaxation of that essential tact I found in most of the poems where the shell-form finds its own correspondences with the human sensibility, odd and minor places where I felt the ego was slightly too insistent.

There is a pervasive upbeat humour that runs through the poems, sometimes to be found unexpectedly. Among Morgan-Shae’s acknowledgments was one to our dinkum Jacobite, “Sir Les Murray”, that suggested he had accepted a knighthood at last. Of the Garter, Thistle or Golden Fleece, I was left wondering.