Ruth Sharman’s  Scarlet Tiger reviewed by Claire Dyer in The High Window

Scarlet Tiger by Ruth Sharman. £10. Templar Poetry.  ISBN: 9781911132103

 Although there has been a twenty year pause between the publication of Ruth Sharman’s first collection, Birth of the Owl Butterflies (Picador, 1997) and Scarlet Tiger (Templar, 2016), what is striking is that in this second book there is the feeling that Sharman is continuing a conversation she started all those years ago.

And what’s more she is unafraid of repeating herself, using familiar motifs such as the frequent: butterflies, moths, flowers, birds, and the less frequent: lipstick, silverfish, her wedding dress and dusk, or of using her poems as tools in what seems to be an ongoing argument with herself about life, love and loss; an argument which is both refreshingly honest and spoken with a consistency of voice that says, ‘Know me, here I am.’

The three-part structure of Scarlet Tiger also mirrors the structure of her first book. In Part I we meet again her father and his moths and butterflies, and are made aware of his and their mortality.  Foregrounded also is Sharman’s struggle with the distiction between knowing and being known. In Part II the voice, although resolutely the same, shifts a gear as the story moves on to marriage, motherhood and a different type of loss. In Part III the gaze moves to art, objects, photographs – tangible vehicles through which she, as poet, continues to explore the meanings of connection.

Sharman says that her poems are ‘hard won’ but they don’t appear so. They move down the page with a light tread, aided by her light touch with punctuation and use of white space. She also says that she sees poetry ‘as crystallising experience, imposing pattern and form on flux and change’ as if to enable her ‘to feel – for the briefest moment – as if I were standing outside time. There is a sense in which writing poetry feels like living life twice over – living it and saving it.’

This sense of living life and saving it is made evident in ‘Dancing’ with which she ends Part I of the book. In it she is bringing her lepidopterist father’s butterflies back to life. She, plus another, who could be her father or could be someone else:

… lean in close and breathe …

As carefully as you pushed them home,
we’ll pull out every heart-pin

and use our fingertips to smooth
each ruffled scale and shattered wing.

And then the colours and shapes reappear as the poem’s pace picks up to match heartbeat to wingbeat in a frenzy of freedom and return:

as we watch them flying in the last light
and can’t see the sky for dancing.

Towards the end of Part II comes ‘Tinnitus’, addressed to a ‘you’ who again could be everyman or someone very particular. In this poem Sharman balances our inner noise with the silence that stretches between people. She says:

We use the same words – sadness,
tinnitus, red – without knowing
if we mean the same thing.

Moreover, she tells us that between us is a ‘great gulf of air’, and it is this ‘gulf’ which travels the distance into Part III of the collection. Here, for example, in ‘Parable of the Sower’ Sharman’s preoccupation is with the paradox of change; Andrew Taylor’s chapel window at Great Chalfield serving as a reminder of the inability of man to halt change for, even in the permanence of the window and much like her father’s captured butterflies, there are, ‘… timely reminders / of all we stand to lose.’

It seems invidious to pick poems out for special mention as it is in their coherence and the strength of their argument that they emerge and meld. However, following closely to the ‘Parable of the Sower’ comes ‘Cézanne’s apples, etc’ and, as with many of the poems, the title here does just the right amount of work, giving enough and making suggestions without being insistent. In this poem Sharman returns to look once again at the painting of the apples and in so doing bookends what was before with what is now, whilst packing all that has happened in between into the collapse of years, so much so that the yearning to ‘to be there’, back in her childhood of ‘imagined butterflies, / painted sunlight, painted air’ becomes something almost physical.

Scarlet Tiger is at once a collection that is tender and elegiac as well as being robust, with dark veins of struggle and loss running through it. However, in poems that lift off the page like butterflies taking flight, it lays claim to a heritage which Sharman first began exploring in Birth of the Owl Butterflies and, in a collection well worth waiting for, stakes out a future still worth striving for.

Claire Dyer is from Reading, Berkshire. Her two poetry collections: Eleven Rooms and Interference Effects, are both published  by Two Rivers Press. She was the winner of the 2015 Charles Causley Poetry Prize and her novels, The Moment and The Perfect Affair are published by Quercus. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Royal Holloway, University of London. Her website is www.clairedyer.com