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In the garden of her childhood home, on the northeast shore of Scotland, there grew a sumac tree, “one of my mother’s favorites,” recalled the poet, who published her first collection last summer, at 59. When the house sold, Shivas dug up a seedling that was growing from one of the main sumac’s side roots, and took it to plant in the ground outside her own flat. She was living in Jerusalem at the time, but kept the flat in Scotland for when the political situation in Israel got, as she put it, “too intense.”
She forgot the sumac in the trunk of her car for a few days, and thought it had died. But she planted it anyway and, with some water and time, the little tree was just fine.
“It’s proof,” she said in an interview at her yellow house, over the rising scent of Earl Grey tea from mugs she brought from Israel, “that a thing can be transplanted and still thrive.”
Such themes — of displacement and belonging, novelty and home — are central to Shivas’ book, Whit Grace, which weaves in colorful verse her youth in Scotland with the 11 years she spent living in Israel and the feeling of finally settling in Vermont. The 98-page volume, available at Norwich Bookstore, is rich with each of the places Shivas carries inside her: their landscapes, their life rhythms and, because she is a poet, their languages.
But language is a complicated thing for a writer who grew up in a culture that had come detached from its linguistic roots.
In 1707, Scotland voted its Parliament out of existence, uniting its rule with that of Great Britain. Though this came with financial benefits for Scotland, it also came at a steep price: Scottish culture and language became suppressed, and “English culture was the dominant one until the 1900s,” Shivas said. “Scottish culture was considered very twee, and was not taken seriously by the English. … If I used the (Scots) language in school, I would get the red pen.”
Of the three Scots tongues, Shivas’ is Doric. The name of the language itself derives from a pejorative term, used to refer to the dialect of the rural peasants who lived outside of ancient Athens, she said.
In high school, she discovered that there were, in fact, “certain Scottish poets who gave distinct impressions of the culture,” she said, citing Hugh MacDiarmid and Nan Shepherd as some of her favorite voices of the Scottish literary tradition.
Taking her cue from those writers who spoke their own truth to a power Shivas thinks of as colonial, the transplanted poet wants her work to be “true to my experience as a Scot,” she said. As for just what that experience is, “that’s the question I’m asking of myself. … What is it about? The repression of language and culture, how does that play out in everyday life?”
The title poem in her collection, An Wi Whit Grace, explores this question through Shivas’ dual lingual identity. Partway through, the poem shifts from “proper” English into the warm and earthy Doric of her childhood. It begins:
Fish-hook sharp,
lochan deep,
she holds her peaty vision
dark in the pupil
of her eye,
no reflected sky.
Jet and far as space,
as full as light,
the gleg n spark,
Scottish child
div ye ken yer place
in the universe?
Faar’s hame?
Ye hiv tae keep sayin
it’s aricht
it’s nae sae bad
whit wis hale
wisnae ever broken.
Here you know
the lie of the land.
“It was a great surprise,” Shivas said softly, “to incorporate these bits of vocabulary” into the poems that would come to make up Whit Grace. It wasn’t until starting her Master of Fine Arts in poetry, from Drew University in New Jersey, that she started to wonder why there was this whole other dictionary in her mind that she never transcribed to the page.
She had begun writing poems seriously after moving to Israel with her husband, the now-retired dermatologist Sidney Klaus, who was chairman of the dermatology department at a Jerusalem hospital. Klaus and Shivas met while she was a graduate student at the University of London, working toward her doctorate in the aesthetics of dance.
She had already earned her master’s in the philosophy of education, but never finished her PhD, in part because of what she described as “an experience of how a change of government can affect personal lives.” Margaret Thatcher came to power in the United Kingdom when Shivas was about two years into her program, and due to some policy changes brought about by the conservative British prime minister, Shivas lost her government grant to study full-time.
This was terribly disappointing to her, but there was, she now reflects, a silver lining: Without losing her funding, she might never have forayed so full-heartedly into poetry. She did love studying dance, because she is deeply taken with how the body itself can serve as a vessel for meaning, but “it is also true that … I had a sense that my deepest creative energy was not fully engaged,” she said.
When her husband took his job in Jerusalem, it changed her world. She couldn’t really carry on the work she’d been doing, since so much of it was based on a cultural value system in which she no longer lived. She didn’t speak the language. She’d never lived in the desert, only near the sea.
Though the culture shock did, eventually, set in, “the first year and a half was pure fascination,” she recalled. She traveled around, going on archeology tours and visiting the major landmarks of a region that, despite its ancient history and deep religious significance, was new to her.
Her spiritual beliefs align more with Buddhism — at 3 years old, even though there were no vegetarians in her world, she decided it was wrong to eat animals and has held all life as a “sacred belief” ever since — but “it was fascinating, being plunged into all the history,” she said. The air was thick with the ghosts of a long and important past.
This also was when she realized that it was poetry, and nothing else, that tapped into her deepest creative energy. When she goes for walks, the rhythm of her steps bring her phrases that serve as poetic beginnings. When she drives, the steady hum of the engine ushers in lines of iambic pentameter.
Not long after she and Klaus moved to Israel, they started to feel the rumblings of the First Gulf War, which finally erupted in the early 1990s.
“There was a very tense lead-up,” Shivas said. “The political situation was a challenging one. Virtually all the foreigners had gone.” People would stop her in the street, she recalled, and ask why she was still there. Didn’t she know what was coming?
She did, though. In her poem The Masks, she writes about the “taut days before the war,” when they taped plastic bags over their windows to seal out the possible mustard gas and kept towels on hand to jam under the door:
Downtown we fill forms,
paperwork for foreigners
to pick up masks … near identical
to the black rubber
horse-head long-kept
by my grandmother
in a wooden chest.
We take the masks
when we go out.
Still, though she and Klaus always knew that their life in Jerusalem would be a temporary one, “it definitely became home,” she said. She made herself learn Hebrew, which she described as “one of the hardest things I’ve ever done … but I couldn’t not do it.” She researched the culture and the history behind it.
“But it’s so different to read about the history of a place, versus knowing it,” she said. “It didn’t belong to me in the way it would belong to someone else” — someone like the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, who spent 26 years in exile but who plumbed his connection to his homeland with a depth that, Shivas said, “made my heart sing.” In the epigraph to Whit Grace she quotes a line from one of Darwish’s poems: “I have learned and dismantled all the words in order to draw from them a single word: Home.”
And this word is also at the heart of Whit Grace. What does it mean to belong, to a landscape or language or history? Can we belong to a place if we have no roots except the ones we put down ourselves?
Shivas’ personal definition of that word, “home,” was by now multi-layered, and only expanded further when they left Israel in 1999. Klaus was now starting another position, at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, and it was then that they moved into the yellow house on a hill.
True to Shivas’ form, the poems she wrote in Vermont were steeped in the unmistakable imagery of the Upper Valley, from the “crazy paving pieces of ice (that) float white down the dark Connecticut river” to March Day’s description of how the “Ompompanoosuc gushes, spurts in spate, frost heaves like standing waves toss cars.” In A Hebridean Day on the Hill, Vermont, Shivas captures how the “far views are lost in drifts-of-mist,” while the percussion of falling water “beat(s) on my Goretex jacket hood.”
Now that she knew she was a poet, Shivas was able to carve out a place for herself in the Upper Valley with this identity in mind. She led a poetry group at Norwich Public Library for around eight years. She puts her education degree to work by teaching classes on Scottish literature and poetry at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Dartmouth College, which helps her feel connected to her first home and encourages her to keep digging into her own literary heritage.
It was far easier, Shivas said, to make the move from Israel to the Upper Valley than from London to Israel. “After all I am a white, English-speaking woman moving to a place that is largely white and English-speaking,” she said. The biggest adjustment — as evidenced by the wintry, blustery language of many of the Vermont poems — might have been to the seasons, after a decade living in desert climes.
“I didn’t know what to wear!” she laughed. “Once I got that sorted, it was much easier.”
Which is all to say that their yellow house on a hill did become home.
And that a person, like a sumac tree, can be transplanted and come to thrive.
To learn more about Anne Shivas and her work, go to anneshivas.com.
EmmaJean Holley can be reached at ejholley@vnews.com or 603-727-3216.