Shell

by Olive Senior

In Shell, Olive Senior continues her ongoing investigation of the natural world, the nature of poetry and the power of her Caribbean heritage. She is our guide through realms of miniature elegance, those of shells in their abundant manifestations. With her grace, generosity and world-renowned lyricism, Senior gives us hen's eggs as hymns, molluscs as metaphors, shells of all kinds — sometimes fragile, sometimes unyielding — as home, as womb, as token and as totem. Ultimately, she places these shells, small and delicate, at the heart of the Jamaican cane fields, revealing a history rich with culture and haunted by slavery. These are Senior's most powerful and affirming poems to date.

Genres: Poetry

100 pages, Paperback

First published October 15, 2007

About the author

Olive Senior was born and brought up in Jamaica in 1941 and educated in Jamaica and Canada. She is a graduate of Montego Bay High School and Carleton University, Ottawa.

She is one of Canada's most internationally recognized and acclaimed writers having left Jamaica in 1989, spending some years in Europe and since 1993 being based in Toronto.

Among her many awards and honours she has won the Commonwealth Writers Prize and F.G. Bressani Literary Prize, was nominated for a Governor-General’s Literary Award, and was runner up for the Casa de Las Americas Prize and the Pat Lowther Award. In 2003, she received the Norman Washington Manley Foundation Award for Excellence (preservation of cultural heritage – Jamaica). Her body of published work includes four books of poetry, three collections of short stories and several award-winning non-fiction works on Caribbean culture.

Reviews

[Kiki · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 ⭐

2nd read: Olive Senior's historian skills are on mighty show in this collection as she mined several bodies of knowledge to describe the different Caribbean experiences: Taíno, African and European.

Through several motifs she pushes one to consider how to read the history of the different peoples and their legacy passed down through stories, bodies, artefacts, economies and spiritualities. The shell as home, shelter, body; the grinding of food, objects, people; the contrasted substantiality of "great houses" Vs our "fragile fetishes of power"; the grave and decay's transformative and regenerative possibilities. This repetition never palls but offers the reader seemingly endless avenues to discern "the essence not what we consume but what / remains and speaks to us".

There is a novel length's worth of themes in this 90+ page poetry collection--a testament not only to the form's continuous relevance but Senior's intellectual, emotional, and writing prowess.

You should read it 🐚.

**********

1st review: This collection hollows out the Caribbean experience, filling it with everything, from Taino creation myths to a slave owner's nauseatingly lavish dining tables, to you here, in the now, hatching.


There's a lot of memorable imagery and metaphor with shells and corn and the different meanings dust carry for the different inheritors of colonialism.


I hadn't read Senior's poetry seriously since high school but this book has turned me into a true believer. 

[2TReads · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection dripped with history, legacy, meaning, and the wealth of my island and region's exploitation at the hands of colonial powers.

-Brace yourself for whirlwinds coiled at my heart- Gastropoda.

Reading Olive Senior's poems(or novels), one cannot help but to be in awe at the knowledge held within each line and to become reflective as we ponder the simplest of items that carry such history or are a main part of our existence.

These poems pull light and dark from our past, bringing our present into stark clarity: So if in years to come some people might be mad enough to search for us, to trace our passing, they would have to dig deep to find us here, sift ashes, measure bones and beads and shell discarded- Excerpt from Shell.

Like a shell that holds the markings, memories of the life that once wore it, so does Senior trace the lines, ridges, mountains, and valleys of our island, our region. Every part has a meaning, a story to tell, all one must do is hold a shell to your ear, take a breath, calm your mind, and listen. It's right there, waiting to be heard.

I got goosebumps, chills, heat flashes, everything while reading these poems. Not only are they history, they are the stories of those who came before, who left their mark, for us to see, learn, and remember.

Encased within every shell, a part of our past, with threads of beauty, bite, and strength. Senior is unapologetic as she traces our island's story and these poems are brilliance laced with iridescence and fire.

[Jherane Patmore · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book shell down the place. lol.
I love how Olive is able to take some very simple things and make profound social commentary. My favourite in this was Pearl. I'll be re-reading soon.

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

"These are poems sprouting from the sugar cane fields on islands drenched in blood, the former British West Indies." (Author's Note)

Growth rings inscribe
inside each shell
the markers of
a former life.

This shell, my skin,
outers a life
still stretched
still lived in.

- Shelter, pg. 16

* * *

Trophy wife, power object, your lustre fading
from neglect: Pull that rope from around your neck.

Don't you want to be free? Come now, break the spell.
Let each pearl be. Or cast them before swine. What

have you to lose? Honour, like the pearl, is already used.

Keep a single pearl for contemplation of the kingdom
within, or ingest it for melancholy, madness, and other

lunar folly. Better yet, count it a blessing, save for
longevity. Too many lives already lost for this string.

- Pearl, pg. 22

* * *

Likl bwoy, come here. Is April Fool Day. Tek this message to that lady you see there. Do as she say. Make sure you don't tek fas' open it up so read - I will know; I will give you bus' ass! Plus you would find out it say: Send the fool a little further. Heh-heh.

- Send the Fool a Little Further, pg. 41

* * *

It is not so much the shell shock as questions
we never asked that leave us cowering still
among the dead sugar metaphors.

Is this a legacy or something for which I am still
expected to pay? The circle on dust left by ghost
mules turning widdershins, turning the ghost
mills, turning the can stalks into question:

Are cane-cutters' children destined to rise,
like stalks, bloom like cane tassels, or to sink,
rootwise, into anger ratooning still?

Still as the closed circle of the mill.
Still as the knife blade descending.

This still life could wear us down.

- Canefield Surprised by Emptiness, pg. 55

* * *

Broken and fragmented material
recovered through excavation

quantifiable

patterns observable in the frequency and
distribution of discarded

goods

- Found Poem Regarding Archeological Concerns, pg. 67

[Shivanee Ramlochan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cup your ear towards the sound of an entire world. The poems in Shell actively listen to you. They speak of the blood legacy of sugarcane in the former British West Indies, in the voice of the cane itself: what originates in each molecule, what force and pressure is needed for both sucrose and human extraction. Nothing Olive Senior writes fades. These poems have done the work of a hundred textbooks in me, illuminating, memorying.

“It is not so much the shell shock as questions
we never asked that leave us cowering still
among the dead sugar metaphors.

Is this a legacy or something for which I am still
expected to pay? The circle on dust left by ghost
mules turning widdershins, turning the ghost
mills, turning the cane stalks into questions”

23/31
#TheSealeyChallenge

[Buried In Print]

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