Jo Shapcott wins Costa Prize

31 Jan 2011

It was announced yesterday that Jo Shapcott is the surprise winner of the 2010 Costa Book of the Year which comes with a £30 000 award. Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with the Amber Eyes had been tipped to win but Shapcott’s Of Mutability had a ‘clear majority’ from the judges who this year included Ruth Padel, Adele Parks and Natasha Kaplinsky among others.

Shapcott is no stranger to literary prizes; in the past she has won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, the Forward Poetry Prize and the National Poetry Competition.

Below is a review of the winning work.

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Of Mutability
By Jo Shapcott
Faber and Faber, 2010, ISBN 978-0-571-25470-5
Price: £12.99

Phil Sidney

‘Don’t trouble, though, to head anywhere but the sky’, writes Jo Shapcott in ‘Of Mutability’, the poem that opens her latest collection; the book’s final poem sees her following her own advice, floating above London in a fitting finale to a collection intimately concerned with upwardness.

That in that last poem (‘Piss Flower’) the poet is floating on a jet-stream of her own urine tells us many things (not least that Shapcott is the first Faber poet to allude, wittingly or not, to The Mighty Boosh), but principally that Of Mutability is neither a rarefied book nor a po-faced one. Much of the press coverage of this collection has focused on the cancer that Shapcott contracted and survived while writing it: the book is dedicated to the doctors who treated her, but the disease doesn’t dominate proceedings. ‘Forget what’s / happening in my cells’ she implores the reader (‘Stargazer’), instead incorporating her illness into the collection’s wider project.

As the title suggests, Of Mutability is very much a metaphysical collection, albeit always with a small ‘m’. From the outset, Shapcott is concerned with shifts and transformations, not least in her own body. Her self-casting as a tightrope-walker in ‘La Canterina’ is only the most explicit of a series of performances throughout the book. In ‘La Serenissima’ a walk through Venice sees Shapcott acting as a prism of light and water, while her creation of antibubbles both physically and linguistically in ‘Deft’ call our attention to the play of elements in many of the poems. Air and water pervade, lending a translucent effulgence to Shapcott’s lines as she gazes on the thoughts of a bald woman ‘shining through the skull’ (‘Hairless’), or primes herself ‘to ingest all weathers’.

Fittingly for a book so concerned with cells, however, a nucleus of materiality complements its more limpid aspects and prevents any breezy ascent into transcendence. Six tree poems towards the end of the collection evince an intimate concern with touch and texture, as Shapcott runs a hand over whorls and gnarls looking for ‘gaps to put a fist in or a heart’ (‘Trasimeno Olive’). The tenderness of ‘I Go Inside the Tree’, in which the woodworm Shapcott burrows ‘scoffing years of drought and woodworm’ ‘until the O my god at the heart’ gives some idea of the play between two different kinds of delicacy. Of Mutability is full of such transactions between the solid and the solute: clouds coalesce into kernels, and the bottom falls out of the familiar.

Nevertheless, one of the best aspects of this collection is its maintenance of contact with the everyday, projecting constellations onto and through the mundane. In ‘Composition’ a catalogue of distractions arrange and resolve themselves into a poem, while in both ‘Tea Death’ and ‘Procedure’ a cup of tea comprehends worlds. In the former a collapse into a cuppa evokes an amber fantasia in which protagonist welters in infusion, while ‘Procedure’ sees the speaker move from ‘This tea, this cup of tea, made of leaves, / made of the leaves of herbs and absolute / almond blossom’ past memories of ‘cellular madness’ to a final ‘thank you thank you thank you for the then, and now’.

The naked intensity of that last line belies the gentle solidity of Shapcott’s style: nothing is forced here, each word moving with its own weight. In ‘Night Flight from Muncaster’, the poet turns the reader into an owl, sending her up ‘to read the silences of air, / its meanings, currents and pressures. / You can hear clouds creak, droplets hiss.’ Of Mutability provides an updraft on which the reader can soar into intimacy with the clouds, and become a student of tininess in excelsiority.