Other than her Rilke translations, published in 2001 by Faber as Tender Taxes, Of Mutability is Jo Shapcott’s first collection for 12 years. This long gap may have been partly a result of the illness to which she alludes in ‘Procedure’: “all that mess / I don’t want to comb through here because / it seems, honestly, a trifle now that steam // and scent and strength and steep and infusion / say thank you thank you thank you for the then, and now.” Coming on the penultimate page of the collection, this seems to offer something of an apology and explanation for her silence on the subject: the preparation of herbal tea becomes in the poem the more important topic. In Of Mutability Shapcott largely avoids the autobiographical in favour of the universal. Not in the sense of dealing with the perennial ‘large’ themes of love and death, although these are present throughout, but in the sense of inspecting the quotidian and finding in it a beauty and relevance available to all. From the brewing of herbal tea in ‘Procedure’, to the bald head of a cleaning lady in ‘Hairless’; from the Gherkin building in ‘Gherkin Music’, to the sleep deprivation of a student in ‘The Bet’, these poems look at the world around us in a way both recognisable and also slant. One thinks of those close-up pictures of everyday items, where the curve of a spoon or the angles of a cheese-grater take on a strange otherness. Shapcott has always been a playful and sometimes even surreal poet, and this collection will not disappoint those who already admire her work.

At the mid-way point of the book, the Roman poet Ovid turns up as the subject of a ‘Gypsies’ Tale’. As the author of Metamorphoses, he is perhaps something of a guiding spirit. The shifting waters of the first few poems (“Everything I could see belonged to water”) recall the constant changes of Ovid’s characters who become water themselves, as well as flora and fauna. Ovidian trees appear towards the end of the collection, with Shapcott guiding us inside an ash (“mouthing pith and sap, / until the O my god at the heart.”) and finding “elephant hide and cracked pony” in a ‘Cedar of Lebanon’.

The mutability of the title seems entirely appropriate for a collection by this poet, for her work has the ability to change the way you view the world around you simply through its unique vision. The subjects of the poems have their mutability too: life ends easily in ‘Scorpion’, with its nod to DH Lawrence’s ‘Snake’, the wind becomes a tower in ‘St Bride’s’, the human body mutates and changes, even the reader does not escape, becoming an owl in ‘Night Flight from Muncaster’. Yet the shifts and alterations that run throughout are often contained in that most frame-like of forms, the sonnet. There are 9 in total, with a couple of other poems that look like they want to be sonnets. This is perhaps the biggest nod to ‘traditional’ verse in the collection. The rhyme-scheme employed is usually subtle and unobtrusive, with half-rhymes being a common feature, whilst the line-length of most poems is guided by Shapcott’s excellent sense of rhythm as opposed to any fixed metrical or syllabic structure.

The tone of the poems themselves also exhibits this mutability, with the tone shifting between poems and even mid-poem, from the conversational to the lyrical, formal to colloquial or from the scientific to the fantastical. Shapcott does not shy away from surprising the reader, even while she moves amongst the familiar. As she says in the title poem: “Don’t trouble, though, to head anywhere but the sky.”

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