Book Review: Brenda Shaughnessy's "Human Dark with Sugar"

Brenda Shaughnessy, Human Dark With Sugar, (Copper Canyon Press, 2008),77 pages, poetry,$15.00 U.S.

Meditate on the title of this collection and you will know the sum of its contents. Yet at the same time, you will know nothing. Brenda Shaughnessy delivers a second book with more layers than an onion. This is the most interesting little volume I've read this year.

Shaughnessy deals in the complexities of the inner self and the duplicities present in all humans. Much of the time she is engaged in exploring these disparate threads of the self and is trying to tie them into a single thread while acknowledging the impossibility of doing so. She freely questions the benefits of these efforts at simplification. She also applies this to the act of poetry itself, as in these lines from Why Is the Color of Snow?:

Let's ask a poet with no way of knowing.
Someone who can give us an answer,
another duplicity to help double the world.

What kind of poetry is all question, anyway?
Each question leads to an iceburn,
a snownova, a single bed spinning in space.

Poet, decide! I am lonely with questions.

The contradictions explored continue with Don't Be So Small, Poet which enlarges on the role of the poet as expressed in the foregoing:

is something you might say.
Don't be only that small.

If you can't be big, at least
be permolecular, viral, microbial,

be a poet of existence,
go smaller and more

insinuating, in eachness.
No one needs an everyday poet.

Shaighnessy is certainly a poet of existence- even the grittier, more intimate aspects. She plays on the multiplicities of relationships. This is sexy poetry, very sexy. Sometimes this is a little uncomfortable as when in stanza 6 of The Loved Body a man is described in some detail while in the act of putting on a condom with one hand and Shaughnessy's straight-forward, unapologetic discussions of sexual pluralsy.

All of this makes for a complicated, challenging poetry full of juxtapositions that startle, puzzle, delight, and tantalize. Demanding multiple read-throughs, this book demonstrates the best of what contemporary poetry is offering. It invites rumination and engages the mind in truly stimulating and sometimes unique ways. It might be worthwhile to watch Shaughnessy's career. She has mapped out an irresistible trajectory.