A diptych of art and empathy — In conversation with Erin Shiel
"I realised that in order to find time to think and a view of what felt like the whole world, I had to be uncomfortable."
Image Credit: Recent Work Press
She recounts a frequent episode in her girlhood with a grin. When the house clamoured with demands and stressors and responsibilities, she would slink outside into crisp air. Hoisting herself up onto the top of her house, she’d soar from whatever was down below, and glide into the words of a book, any book. From there, she says, she had a whole view of the world in its clarifying glory. But as she gazed ahead, the corrugated iron roof dug into her hips.
"I realised that in order to find time to think and a view of what felt like the whole world, I had to be uncomfortable."
Sydney-based poet Erin Shiel’s debut collection, “Girl on a Corrugated Roof”, is forthcoming in June this year with publisher Recent Work Press. The book has been decades in the making. It is a tender assortment of vignettes on girlhood, identity, and the neglected beauty of everyday life. There is fictional fabric woven on an autobiographical loom. The thread that ties the works together is a phantom presence: a spirit of a girl, who Shiel frames as more inviting than eerie. Affectionately named “ghost girl”, the book tracks her coming-of-age, as the spirit acquaints herself with the audience. “She has always been in my life”, Shiel shares. She’s unsure whether the spirit is a manifestation of herself, or an imaginary companion, or a symbol of girlhood. Regardless, the spirit provides Shiel with the supernatural compulsion to write.
Much like during her own life, Shiel chases the apparition through the pages of her book. Her mystery becomes Shiel’s frame of reference. She is the foundation for each of the book’s sections, which cleverly delineate an arc of maturation.
Shiel’s poetic domain is wide-ranging. She masterfully controls territories of girlhood, motherhood and grief, whilst infusing her poems with artistic and emotive commentary. When I ask about her attraction to ekphrastic poetry — poems which detail an artistic work — she laughs and offers up: “I think I am a frustrated visual artist”. I chuckle along, but her poetry is stunningly visual, derived from an artist’s eye. Her work “Ringtail” embodies a moving, lithe possum tail; “Swimmer” visually oscillates like the pace of paddling.
Shiel has an ardent love for art, but acknowledges its manifold inaccessibility to many people. Particularly, she describes how galleried art suffers from an inaccessibility of meaning. Plaques aren’t enough, she argues. “Poetry provides an entrance”. Shiel cites poetry’s ambiguity as its best asset and the reason why it triumphs prose in offering an entrance to art. Its vagueness grants the reader subjectivity, allowing them to forge a personal connection with the art: she remains true to this philosophy in her ekphrastic poems. In her works alluding to art, such as “In Patricia Piccinini’s workshop” , Shiel’s empathetic qualities shine prominently. A trained counsellor, Shiel has a keen eye for observing emotion. She writes of the sculpted mother: “She is the comforter and there are no limits to her love/She is glued to a glowing infant”, an intimate exploration of emotion, a pattern of human nurturing imposed on art.
Shiel’s claim that poetry may provide an entrance to art due to its ambiguity initially confronts me. It is poetry’s ambiguous construction that sometimes vexes even the most ardent prose reader. But as Shiel illuminates the beauty in inserting your own subjectivity, with no accountability measure dictating what is right and wrong, I am reminded of her corrugated roof motif, where we submit to slightly discomforting things to be gifted with greater clarity — much like how we must stew in the initial unease when faced with a vague poem in order to receive the largesse of literature.
With many female poetic inspirations such as her mentor, Judy Beveridge, Gwen Harwood, Sharon Olds, Dimitra Harvey, Judith Wright and more, Shiel’s poetry also wrestles with the forces of carefree youth and motherhood’s impacts on identity and creativity.
Shiel speaks of the strongly collaborative nature of modern poetic creation, particularly in female poet circles. She’s been a part of the same poet’s crew — guided by Judith Beveridge — since her Masters at USyd, where colleagues meet frequently, share their work and candidly give feedback. “I see collaboration in the future”, she declares when I ask about the horizon for poetry. In the midst of so many futuristic technological offerings, she reminds me that the best way to progress forward is to return to the basic element of human connection. Shiel puts her beliefs into practice — her works embody the ideology of collaboration with peers: in “Put out the light”, she inserts references to Judith Wright’s work to pay homage to female poets whilst simultaneously accentuating their undervalued position in class syllabi. In many poems, such as “Enough fabric to make a dress”, she borrows and embeds lines from her forebears to tie together the plight of women in a parcel of timeless girlhood.
When asked if poetry is facing its demise or on the uprise, I get a knee-jerk reaction. “An upsurge for sure!” she exclaims with reassuring certainty. New avenues of creation such as social media facilitate only more and more poetry, and allow it to be shared with larger and larger audiences. Shiel’s poetry collection itself is a testament to the form’s everlasting freshness. Her compassionate coalescence of art, womanhood and affect lays a thick slab onto a fast-climbing tower of contemporary poetics — a skyscraping reminder that poetry is closer to its era of birth than death.