Mslexia

Mslexia, the magazine for women who write | www.mslexia.co.uk

Inspirations

MAKING A POEM: Penelope Shuttle

Interviewed by Kate Clanchy

THE REPOSE OF BAGHDAD

If we ever meet again,
and I don’t see how we can,
it won’t be on the Avenida del Poeta Rilke
in Ronda,
or by the banks of the green Guadalquiver,
or in Granada
where the sunset goes on till midnight,
it won’t be in any of those towns by the sea
we called our own,
or in the plaza Abul Beka
where the house martins feed their fledglings
in mud-nests under the sills,
or in the square
where the foal above the fountain
watches his moon shadow
on the wall of an inn old when Cervantes knew it,
and it won’t be up in the mountains
where in the hottest hour of the day
one hundred thin long-faced wild sheep
pour out of a cave, as from the underworld.

If I ever see you again
it won’t be in the water mirrors
of the Alhambra
or in a building
that doesn’t know if it’s a cathedral
or a mosque
or by the fountains of the Garden of the Poets
in the Alcazar Real
or in the dark oratory
where they keep the writing bones
of St Juan de la Cruz, gift-wrapped
in white ribbons.

And if I ever travel north,
you won’t be sitting beside me
on the bus to Silverknowles,
Clovenhorn or Rosewell

If I ever sleep with you again
it won’t be in our own eager bed
or in that haunted hotel four-poster in Glastonbury,
on the drunken sleeper to Paddington
or on board the QE2 well below the waterline,

we won’t sleep together
in any friend’s spare bed
or on a neighbour’s floor
after some burst pipe emergency
or in that hilarious sleepless bed
of our first year together,
no, if we ever meet again
(and how can we?)
it will be in a summer time has lost track of,
in a back-street hostel
hidden in a labyrinth of tiny white lanes,

two steps past the old Synagogue
and the dens of the silversmiths,
within the white walls
and behind the black window grilles
of The Repose of Baghdad,
still bearing, see it?
it’s faded sign of star and crescent moon.

Some poems are gifts;…

…this is one of them. I was travelling in Andalusia with my daughter Zoë, two years after the death of my husband, Peter Redgrove. I had been through the anguish, and the silence, written the grieving poems, the ‘Missing You’ poems of Redgrove’s Wife, and I had got to a new place in bereavement, when you can function and enjoy things, and yet you are still aware of the lost person, thinking about him. Your relationship with the dead person has changed, but it is still there.

You know that sense…

…that the dead person is there, about to walk through the door? I never had that. Peter was in his poems, but I never felt he was in his boots, his shoes, his stick. But in Andalusia, bizarrely, a place where we’d never been together, I suddenly felt his spirit. And I saw the little hostel at the end of the poem and suddenly felt we could meet there. That’s what the poem does, it allows us to meet – not in heaven, I have no religious beliefs – but in the realm of the imagination, in poetry.

I drew the images…

…from the journey I was taking with Zoë and from memories of journeys I took with Peter. All the images seemed near at hand, easy to gather. The history of Andalusia was important to me in writing the poem – the idea of a place where Muslim, Christian and Jew lived harmoniously together – and that is especially important in the end of the poem, in the extraordinary name of the little hostel, The Repose of Baghdad – the end of the war.

I knew what sort of poem…

…it would be from the start – longer and more epistolary than the anguished lyrics I’d been writing. The shape of the poem, its repetition and major stanza breaks, were there from the beginning. When I got back to England and relaxed my handbag paranoia, I promptly had my bag stolen in Borders. All my notebooks from the journey, including this poem, were in it. I was so furious, I sat down and wrote it out from memory that same evening. An entirely different poem may be in a skip somewhere.

I went through writer's block …

…when Peter died. Time and therapy got me out of it. I started to write again slowly, at first writing bad, cathartic, unpublishable poems. Now I’m writing steadily again. Poetry is a healing process – Peter believed that very strongly.

I have learned this poem by heart…

…I don’t intend to lose it again. This is a consolatory poem rather than a grieving poem, the first poem of a new book.

PENELOPE SHUTTLE lives in Cornwalll. Her latest collection, Redgrove’s Wife, was shortlisted for the 2006 T S Eliot Prize and is available from Bloodaxe Books.

This feature has been selected from the Mslexia archive. For the latest on the writing world, publishing and creativity subscribe now. To sample more Mslexia features or to find out about the latest issue click here.