11 - ‘Wanderer, incomer, borderer/ liar, mother of everything I see’: Jo Shapcott's Engagement with Landscape, Art and Poetry

Summary

I grew up in a new town where there were certainly no ‘vowel meadows’ and no one way of speaking at all and no connection between language and landscape but what I came to discover was something I now feel is very contemporary – and that is a kind of aesthetic that demands travel, it demands, in a sense, rootlessness and even exile.

Whatever the landscape had of meaning appears to have been

abandoned,

unless the road is holding it back, in the interior

where we cannot see […]

Landscape begins where we begin to look. And, as many recent cultural geographers have pointed out, any visual claim that we make to the landscape is always ideologically situated, perhaps never more so than in terms of constructions of the feminine. In art the connections between woman as nature and nature as woman become deeply entwined, not least because, as Gillian Rose has remarked, ‘the techniques of perspective used to record landscape were also used to map female nudes, and the art genre of naked women emerged in the same period as landscape painting’. If – and I risk this supposition early on in this chapter, ungrounded, in the hopeful expectation that the remainder of the chapter will ground it – one of the hallmarks of postmodernism in poetry is exactly the disconnection between language and landscape of which Shapcott talks, then I am also interested in her attempt to reconcile and reconfigure the relationship between language and landscape in a way that can also accommodate her gender. For although the female body, and how to name and place it in relation to a poetic ‘I’, is a pervasive source of anxiety in twentieth-century women's poetry, it seems to me that Shapcott is rare among her contemporaries in playing out a relationship between self and world so that the fixed matter of the body also becomes unfixed in a merger with the landscape around it. Through her dialogues with several artistic predecessors – Rainer Maria Rilke and Elizabeth Bishop, and the British conceptual artist Helen Chadwick (1953-96) – Shapcott's work makes an important feminist intervention into a troublesome history of representation.