Olive Senior autographs her latest work, 'Shell', for Professor Barry Chevannes at the book launch at the Philip Sherlock Centre, UWI, on Sunday, March 9.- Junior Dowie/Staff Photographer

Title: Shell

Author: Olive Senior

Publisher: Insomniac Press

Reviewed by: Mel Cooke

At the end of the short 'Shell Blow' (only two poems) segment in her poetry collection Shell, Olive Senior ends the poetic prank 'Send the Fool a Little Further' with the title and a snicker of 'Heh-heh'.

And Senior begins the following section with 'Quashie's Song', where "Here the John Crows wheel/And the whip keeps time". It is an appropriate opening poem for the 'Shell Shock' section and it is also an appropriate abrupt change in tone.

Shell, thematically consistent in its focus on the development of Caribbean societies as well as consistent in its examination of the literal and figurative shell, is excellent work. It is, of course, easy to dismiss excellence as par for the course for Senior, whose 'Summer Lightning' won the Commonwealth Writer's Prize. However, Shell is of a standard to impress even those who believe excellence is too ordinary for excellent writers.

transition point

Before that stark, startling transition point from an April Fool's Day trick to the cruelty of slavery, Senior had used the shell of a grain's natural cradle as a cradle for humanity (She writes in 'Maize': "Because I know it's for their own good, I happily watch as/each little one pops out like a pearl. Ivory, Golden. Milky.) and a repository for her life in 'Shelter':

"Growth rings inscribe

inside each shell

the markers of

a former life.

This shell, my skin,

outers a life

still stretched

still lived in."

Both poems are in 'Shell Out', the opening section in which Senior moves easily from the person, singular or collectively (she opens 'Taino Genesis' with "We the people of Cacibajagua emerged/from the cave the moment the Sun's longest leg/splintered the horizon".) to the natural of air and water, notably in 'Hurricanes' and 'Lucea Harbour' respectively. The latter is an exquisite example of Mervyn Morris-esque minimalism, as Senior writes:

"Importunate waves run ceaselessly to kiss the shore./O rigid land, so indifferently receiving them".

In 'Shell Blow', which Senior ends with the seemingly innocent first of April tomfoolery, all the poems save the last end with the instruction to 'PASS IT ON'. And there is a lot to pass on, Senior writing in the first section of the section's title poem

" ... What if one day you accidentally

picked up the right shell - such as I; placed it

to your ear, pressed - by chance - the right

knob, there would pour out not the croak

of song soaked up in sea-water and salt

but the real ting, a blast-out, everybody's

history: areito, canto historico, a full

genealogy of this beach, this island people."

In extending the use of the physical shell past the fanciful, child-like notion of hearing surf retained in the former home of a mollusc, Senior imbues the shell with powers of not only cultural retention but also transmission. And it is this transmission that she is concerned with in 'Shell Shock' onwards.

'Peppercorn' covers the arrival of the Africans, spilling upwards and outwards from the dark shell of a ship's hold ("Disgorged, spilled out, shell-shocked/I come parched and dried, my head/emptied, till shock-still I come to rest,/shelled out, buck naked.") In 'Cane Gang' Senior uses the shell as part of the system of oppression, but still a signal of relief from extended, forced labour ("At shell blow assembled the broken-down/bodies, the job-lots scrambled into gangs ...") and also a means of independence and temporary relief in 'Fishing in the Waters Where My Dreams Lay'. Senior writes:

" ... Alone in my dugout/shell, I dropped/my line and waited with baited breath ..."

'Shelter' sees Senior examining the shell of housing, 'Join-The-Dots' putting the non-existence of slave quarters on many plantation maps into painful perspective ("Our house was built on land where once/a village stood. Where fragments/floating in the air sometimes cried out/for personhood"). Notably, it is a rare trip into a rhyming structure.

closing three-poem

And in the closing three-poem 'Empty Shell', Senior wraps up the collection with the multi-part 'Auction', which without outright mocking makes a mockery of the palatial home of William Beckford Jr, an English plantation owner who never saw the source of his immense wealth. In the end, after his palatial building collapsed (he sold it first) there is:

"Nothing remaining of vanished pride and tower

except the possessions auctioned, collected in

other citadels of power: libraries, museums,

galleries, castles, to gather dust ..."

The cycle is complete. From the Tainos through those who came to those who profited from what they never had a connection with. The shell is empty in terms of transmission, but still full of memory.