The Merchant of Feathers

Tanya Shirley

• Publisher: Peepal Tree Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781845235451
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Poesía

Longlisted for the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, this second collection is full of poems that have their finger on the pulse of contemporary Jamaica in all its exuberance and brokenness. She tells these stories with a winning mixture of acute observation, outrage, outrageousness, tenderness and understanding.

Tanya Shirley presents a poetic persona of a woman who is "sometimes dangling from high wires/ but always out in the open". So that whilst there is no one who so wittily skewers the misogynistic, she is also honest about the complicity of women in their own acts of submission, of how "I danced flat-footed in your dense air".

There is joy in the energy and delights of the body but also a keen awareness of ageing and the body's derelictions. If there is one overarching vision it is that love is "larger than the space we live in", a love represented by the "merchant of feathers… now a woman/ selling softness in these hard times", or the mother who tends the battered face of her son, the victim of a homophobic beating.

There is scarcely a line without some memorable phrase – the madman who chants his "lullaby of badwords", the father who "became the water within him" – but these are much more than an assembly of sharp images; closer reading shows just how shapely and elegant these poems are.

LET THIS BE YOUR PRAISE

THE MERCHANT OF FEATHERS I

got the short end of the stick,

found ill-repute in the under-appreciation

of his work. No one praises

the feathers stuffed into pillows,

the wispy base of dreams,

the floating density of mattresses

that cushion day’s exertion.

No wonder he stuffed his stock

with rocks.

But the merchant of feathers is now a woman

selling softness in these hard times,

stretching rations to feed the multitudes.

She is the domestic worker

tireless in her cleaning of the country’s sores.

She is the woman whose song

lifts like mist from the Blue Mountains.

Sometimes she chants and hits her head

against walls, but never mind,

she is standing between us and evil spirits,

her body a buffer in the night’s dead breeze.

So often, we praise her for being the rock

but let us praise her, too, for bringing feathers

to buoy us up, beauty so easy now to forget.

ON THE OTHER SIDE OF MADNESS

To the man of unsound mind who lives in the bushes

below my window, I hear you each night howling

against the still breath of rustling leaves

and brittle twigs that break underfoot.

I push off sleep to sit up with you, sending

wishes of calm through these concrete walls.

I know how the voices inhabit,

the pure dread of seeing red everywhere:

in the moon’s eyes, in the belly of stars.

As you chant your lullaby of bad words,

I leaf through the Bible searching for psalms

to whisper across the divide.

I want to throw you a lighter

on nights when you misplace yours.

I know how a lighter can ignite bush fire

to ward off mosquitoes and evil spirits;

holy lighter needed to cook on the nights

you remember hunger.

But I am afraid to throw salvation at your feet,

in case you seek me out come morning,

throw stones as sign of thanks,

or the lighter landing at your feet

will force you to look up, thinking God

lives in a brand new town-house complex.

At last He has found you.

Halleluiah, wrap up your small bundle and climb.

DINING AT CUSTOMS

Miss Gloria had risen early that morning,

cooked the goat she had killed and seasoned

the night before in a Dutch pot over a coal fire

in her cousin Doris’s back yard right between

the coconut trees that lived through three hurricanes.

She would eat it when she got in from the airport,

the yellow spicy meat, fragments of sunlight

settling in her stomach, warming her bones with

memories of somewhere other than this place

where William, her son, recipient of scholarship

to Harvard had settled, then sent for her.

She arrived during summer, pleased that here, too,

there was heat. The first winter she spoke to no one,

betrayed by the suddenness of cold, the imperialism

of snow, the son who learned to live with below zero.

For five years she cleaned, cared for his zombie children,

took orders from his wife, who Miss Gloria swears

is secretly a man. One day, head tied, brown socks

pulled up to her knees, arms akimbo, she said,

“William, I going home for a little holiday.

Too much people dying behind my back.”

For two months, she sat on a verandah

regaling the district with Uncle Sam stories:

how everywhere have elevator, bright lights,

fast service, how her grandchildren smart

and her daughter-in-law pretty like money

and soft-spoken like any English lady.

And now this customs man, face pale like alabaster,

telling her she can’t carry unfrozen curried goat through customs.

Miss Gloria takes off her maroon sweater, spreads it

on the industrial carpet, laps her long floral skirt between

her thighs, eases her body to the floor. She sorry

she don’t have fork or glass full of lemonade,

sorry Doris not here so they can chat and eat, sorry

this man don’t come from anywhere, sorry he going try

to stop her as she put the first piece of meat to her mouth.

And she thinking is that she waiting for long, long time.

AT THE NURSING HOME

“It’s your favourite!” And he smiles. “Is Tanya,

must be Tanya.” He pulls my name

out of some small working portion of his brain,

conjures me up out of dying cells.

I know I am...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• I: The Alphabet of Shame
• II: Standing Outside the Circle
• III: Let This Be Your Praise
• Notes