{"id":16409,"date":"2018-06-10T08:00:39","date_gmt":"2018-06-10T08:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ink.verticalplus.co.uk\/archive\/?p=16409"},"modified":"2020-12-09T14:29:29","modified_gmt":"2020-12-09T14:29:29","slug":"carla-scarano-reviews-scarlet-tiger-by-ruth-sharman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/carla-scarano-reviews-scarlet-tiger-by-ruth-sharman\/","title":{"rendered":"Carla Scarano reviews ‘Scarlet Tiger’ by Ruth Sharman"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The most recent collection by Ruth Sharman, Scarlet Tiger<\/em>, Templar Poetry 2016, won the 2016 Straid Collection Award. It is dedicated to her father and to her son. It is a substantial collection, featuring fifty-nine poems divided in three sections. The first part is mainly about her father and their relationship; the second one is about her son and the last section is on butterflies and paintings, that is ekphrasis, descriptions of paintings in words.<\/p>\n

References to butterflies and moths is a leitmotif that recurs all over the book. Her father used to collect butterflies catching them with a net, trapping them in a jar and finally piercing them with a pin to \u2018fix a soft abdomen in place\u2019. He clearly loved and enjoyed nature but had also an ambivalent attitude of caring for animals, that is he also trapped and killed them. This is never said plainly in Sharman\u2019s poems, which often allude. Her poetry isn\u2019t a straightforward kind of poetry (though she wittily says at the beginning of the first poem, By heart<\/em>, \u2018I want to get things straight\u2019), it is a sort of \u2018slant\u2019 poetry. And maybe things are never easy to express in poetry and in life; they are often complex, hinted, interpretable, alluding to something else. The final sense often eludes us, slips away whenever we believe we are holding it.<\/p>\n

She has a touching affectionate way of remembering her father, although never sentimental, especially during his last days. He couldn\u2019t catch real butterflies any more, only paint them in faded watercolours, a sad, compassionate image of his losing grasp with reality. From her poems, his father emerges as a brave, tough person though helpless in front of death, a bit of a British stereotype: shy, awkward, complex; woods were his heaven and his final advice was to \u2018beware strong emotions\u2019.<\/p>\n

Being Italian and an opera goer, I can\u2019t help linking the theme of butterflies to Madama Butterfly <\/em>by Giacomo Puccini, a story where the protagonist is exactly pinned down by social conventions and her desperate love for her deceitful husband. She is literally pierced in the final act when she commits hara-kiri. A beautiful butterfly caught in a fatal trap. So butterflies seem to be linked to images of women.<\/p>\n

In another poem the poet compares herself to a moth:<\/p>\n

I\u2019m hovering like a moth (Dusk<\/em>)
\nDifferently from colourful butterflies, moths are
\ndifficult to pin down in a book….
\nThey\u2019re pictures out of focus.
\nA reminder of otherness
\nand elsewhere, of only half
\nbelonging in the world of light. (What is it about moths?<\/em>)<\/p>\n

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The poem that titles the collection, Scarlet Tiger<\/em>, is exactly about a moth who refuses to feed; a mutant, who takes its time to change then flies away. I couldn\u2019t help linking it to an essay by Virginia Wolf, The Death of the Moth<\/em>, where moths are described as \u2018hybrid creatures, neither gay like butterflies nor sombre like their own species.\u2019 She narrates him struggling against the approaching inevitable death and acknowledges there is nothing she can do to help. What Virginia Woolf particularly admires is the\u2019 gigantic effort on the part of an insignificant little moth, against a power of such magnitude\u2019.<\/p>\n

Another recurrent theme is fire (After the fire<\/em> and Tabula rasa<\/em>), a real experience or a symbolic one (it doesn\u2019t matter in the end) that burns the past, objects and memories, and leaves you dispossessed but lighter.<\/p>\n

The poems about her son are cute memories of a mother observing how her child grows, learns and plays; sometimes his peaceful attitude is compared to a Buddha.<\/p>\n

My favourite poem in this series is Curtains<\/em>, a \u2018slant\u2019 poem again, where the thin \u2018dark wine, wet sand\u2019 sarong curtains \u2018bought on honeymoon\u2019 enwrap the baby like a womb, shading his quiet sleep, letting the light in, hinting to his conception and birth and to what came after:<\/p>\n

We switched to blue velvet later
\nto block out the light
\nand the flesh-and-blood patterns hang<\/p>\n

in the new house, in a room
\nthat\u2019s sometimes spare,
\nsometimes his dad\u2019s, depending.<\/p>\n

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The poems of the last section, mainly about paintings, are evocative and graceful but less poignant\u00a0 than the previous ones.<\/p>\n

The last poem of the collection, Wishing tree<\/em>, is a philosophical poem meditating on human beings and life:<\/p>\n

longing to connect, longing
\nfor answers from somewhere
\nbeyond ourselves \u2013 never
\nquite at home in the moment,
\nthe moment never enough,<\/p>\n

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Our shifting, ever changing kind of being is never completely happy or satisfied, even in our best moments. We don\u2019t seem to be able to live in the moment plentifully, except in dreams or in fragmented instants rapidly shifting through time.<\/p>\n

Scarlet Tiger<\/em> is a collection of brilliantly crafted, subtle poems to be enjoyed till the last line.<\/p>\n

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Order your copy of Scarlet Tiger<\/em> here:\u00a0https:\/\/templarpoetry.com\/products\/scarlet-tiger<\/a><\/p>\n

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    The most recent collection by Ruth Sharman, Scarlet Tiger, Templar Poetry 2016, won the 2016 Straid Collection Award. It is dedicated to her father and to her son. It is a substantial collection, featuring fifty-nine poems divided in three sections. The first part is mainly about her father and their relationship; the second […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16409","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16409","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16409"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16409\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16412,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16409\/revisions\/16412"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16409"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16409"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16409"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}