Puncher & Wattmann (2024)
Reviewed by Stephanie Green, StylusLit
Reading axolotl waltz feels a little like stepping into a painting by René Magritte or some similarly surreal universe. Challenging to fathom at times, Nathan Shepherdson’s poems here are also curiously absorbing, strange yet intimate, poignant yet playful and often subtly humorous. Some capture paradox, like the poem addressed to Ariel Shepherdson, beginning “I cannot be here until I leave” [85]. Other poems switch from human perspectives to objects, as in ‘the unconsumed apple’, which refers to the poisoned apple that J. Robert Oppenheimer briefly intended for his tutor Patrick Blackett [15-17], or ‘notes taken by a doll in Vienna’ [51-52], based on Oscar Kokoschka’s lithography and his life size doll of Alma Mahler. Many of the poems in this superb collection are given dedications to art and/or artists – a not uncommon feature of Shepherdson’s work. He also gives close attention to language and punctuation as well as measurement, to suggest the way that language accounts, or fails to account, for change or loss.
This volume’s title invokes the almost magical and critically endangered salamander, which possesses a remarkable self-healing capacity. The title reference to axolotl is, however, taken from a quotation given as the opening epigraph: “time drinks rhythms misstepped in its axolotl waltz” [5]. Drawn from a poem entitled ‘Three Mulberry Trees’ (2013), attributed to Giordano Pastore, the line alludes to the way time steps us through the steps and missteps of desire and transformation.
The poems in axolotl waltz are grouped into three sections with intriguing epigraphs of their own, prompted by guide phrases for learning the waltz [Notes, 108]. Read together, perhaps these sectional epigraphs form a poem of their own, perhaps not. In any case, they capture the tight, yet sometimes elusive footwork of human connection and a sense of holding on in the face of difficulty which in some ways characterises this collection. I am reminded, a little, of the formality of John Brack’s ballroom dancers, as portrayed in his painting Backs and Fronts (1969).
The comma makes a regular appearance here as trope, never as punctuation. Rather, the poet uses line breaks, slashes, dashes, arrows and lines, both to give shape to his words and as a way of exploring the implications of pause. The question of pause emerges in axolotl waltz, as a matter of necessity: as breath, suspension, separation, interruption, anticipation, silence, or inexplicable termination. Commas – or pauses that constitute fragile and transformative moments of existence – sleep, desire, silence, paralysis – are often forced to give way to the finality of denial or death. In the first poem of the collection, ‘our heads become glass’, [10-11], Shepherson suggests that thought – or lack of it – can break us and that the artifice of expression can override truth
in the way a comma swings through the trees of this sentence
in the same way an idea
neglects to pause… [10]
Commas appear variously in axolotl waltz as “an aphrodisiac” [83] and as sinkers, red kisses, smiles and pods,. In one of my favourite poems in this collection, ‘William and Catherine’, Shepherdson writes:
either side of their table
William & Catherine Blake
are shelling commas
an intricate task
each one is nested in the soft v
formed with the two index fingers
the comma rested face down
Under pressure from living brackets
the topographical edges of their thumbnails
meeting at their waists
to shape an efficient tool [82]
…
and in the most intense moments
William sees words emerge on Catherine’s lips
wiping them backwards on a spare page
from right to left for tomorrow’s poem [83]
…
there is no rest for the wicked because
the wicked are unable to see
where the rests were removed from their sentences [84]
In the poem ‘words coat the object’ [89-91] Shepherdson’s commas are, among other things, therapeutic tools which account for the haunting fragility of the body and the thin passage between absence and existence.
the venom prays to its simplicity as it kills you
sets clouds loose under your softening fingernails
producing the type of smile drawn on a tree with a knife
you have more than one enemy and I am more than one of them
sleep is damaged at this altitude
a ll commas are hammered flat for use in acupuncture
the vertebrae protrude like questions on your back
i walk my fingers one either side of your spine
stop at the point on the neck most likely to break [89]
Shepherdson doesn’t completely forego the question of the full stop. Amidst the serious play of the poem ‘a full stop reaches the end of its sentence’ [94-97], he tells us:
full stops
can be worked like fillings
into the teeth of language
full stops are sometimes set on fire
and dropped from a great height
onto the bare skin of an ending [95]
The dance of words and ideas in this collection is abstracted in various ways. Often, phrases are marked out, connected or severed by dashes or arrows, or trapped within a defined visual space. In ‘——rotisserie——’ [36-45], for example, a long series of epigrams are strung along a horizontal line. Of course, the comma makes another appearance here too: “——you have the lung capacity of two commas——” [38] .
In the last poem of Shepherdson’s collection, ‘aposiopesis’ [98-107], two voices speak in a series of semi-discontinuous assertions reflecting on writing, art and death, unpunctuated except by a stepped descending line – an open measure of time that marks out their connection. This not-quite dialogue is drawn from the lives and work of Robert Walser (1978-1956) and Adolf Wölfi (1864-1930) who were both patients at the Swiss Waldau Mental Asylum during 1929-1930. ‘aposiopesis’ might be read as an unclosed statement of desperation in the face of those obscure ruptures that awaits every life. The left-hand speaker remarks, for example, “naturally I keep a tally of every breath except the last one” while the right-hand speaker replies, “this insinuating maths offers me everything but maybe” [106]. The importance of aposiopesis is realised, formally and wordlessly, with the bolded comma that ends the poem and the collection.
axolotl waltz is at once puzzling, witty, and intriguing, rich in references to poetry, art, notation and abstraction. Readers willing to take time to experience its adventures will appreciate its rewards.