Natalie Shapero’s subjects in Hard Child range far afield of childhood, but the title indicates its pull. In “Teacup This,” she adds a twist to childhood recall, reaching into her own parenthood:
To my young daughter, I sing the songs
my mother sang to me. Which is to say: to my young daughter,
I sing an eclectic selection of breakup tunes of the ‘60s and ‘70s.
Now I know
you’re not the only starfish in the sea / If I never hear your name
again,
it’s all the same to me… That doesn’t seem quite right
to sing to a baby….
Shapero’s poems frequently see the world and the self in another’s imperfections, endgames, and becomings. Things are not always what they seem, and are most likely flawed, and several of her poems echo the idea that “I, too, am put together to come apart” (“Absence, That Which Never”)—the awareness of which marks the watershed between childhood and adulthood. They turn conversationally at the recognition (“that doesn’t seem quite right”) before lighting out for new and often unexpected territory.
History and the individual coalesce in “Monster,” a two-part poem that recalls the Jewish tradition of not naming a baby before its birth. The poem begins,
Eight women in this class, and me the lone
one refusing to say which name I’ve chosen.
Isn’t anyone else convinced of curses?
The poem then digresses into a contemplation of baby clothes that have been received, one decorated with a rabbit that is “speeding-ticket red.” In the second half of “Monster,” the outfit brings to mind a scene from Schindler’s List, a black-and-white film
except for the one red jacket worn by a child
in the Warsaw Ghetto, then later seen draped
on a pushcart laden with bodies.
To understand the feat of connecting a moment in a room full of pregnant women to one outfit and then to a scene in Schindler’s List is to understand how Shapero is working the line, break, and white space cinematically, with a director’s eye for what’s in and not in each “scene”; in so doing, she allows one fear to balloon into another and finally be overtaken by the biggest fears.
While Shapero’s poems can be darkly humorous, it’s the poet’s acute sense of a moment or an object that makes this book compelling, like the conch in “Person’s Ocean” which Shapero accepts “is truly me, hey / stupid pink turned-in thing thrown / away by the water and bearing / the water’s noises.” Shapero calls forth the riches from whatever material is in front of her—from her daughter, who “knocks, woodpecker-like, her searching mouth // into my breast” to a doughnut (“It took a box of crullers, handed from person to person around / the workroom to make me understand I can’t feel joy”).
The world of the poems is occasionally violent. Yet sometimes something akin to joy breaks through, even though Shapero holds the emotion distant:
Whatever I care for, someone else loves it
more, deserves it more: the doe with her
whole mouth crushing the phlox or the seer
who adores my future, whereas I could
take it or leave it.
(“The Sky”)
The impermanence, the passing through quietly with no fanfare, is at complete odds with the report of the “doe with her/whole mouth crushing the phlox” (the precision and weight of the doe’s mouth—the acridity of the word phlox). Shapero goes on to say “I’ve never actually even seen the sky. / I’ve only seen effluents, seen wattage” but after reading these poems, one might think that’s all that’s needed.