April 2025 Feature: Tanya Shirley
- Jae Nichelle
- Apr 1
- 8 min read
Tanya Shirley is a Jamaican poet, Cave Canem Fellow, and the author of two poetry collections; She Who Sleeps with Bones and The Merchant of Feathers.
Tanya Shirley has published two poetry collections with Peepal Tree Press in the UK: She Who Sleeps with Bones and The Merchant of Feathers. Her work has been featured on BBC World Service, BBC Front Row, Scottish Poetry Library, www.poetryarchive.org, and translated into Spanish and Polish. She received an MFA from the University of Maryland and has been a tertiary-level educator for over twenty years. She is the recipient of a Silver Musgrave Medal from the Institute of Jamaica for her outstanding contribution in the field of Literature. She is also a proud Cave Canem Fellow.
Marriage
It is to be broken. It is to be
torn open.
Wendell Berry
After that year when you were sick
then I was sick then we were sick together,
we had to learn again the landscape
of our pleasure,
how to watch water tiding over our bodies
and think of thirst instead of damage
to a bandage, how to stir need into fire
without worry of fever.
We who had grown accustomed to catheters
and the long arm of monitors had to learn again
the appendages of lust: fingers, tongues, the surprise
of toes, how to lock eyes as we lay flesh folding
into flesh and not see a tunnel leading to death,
how to sit in the quiet of just us
without the crutch of the hospital’s TV
coughing out the news. We had to be enough
mouth to mouth, making a new life of yes, yes,
there, there, just like that and trust
our pressing deeper into each other
was knocking on the muscular door
of memory, how before the wounded year
we welcomed the rhythm of hurt
and heal.
Still, My Body
So many doctors have been inside
the experiment of my body.
Tonsil-less, appendix-less, uterus-less,
I am less than I was
but still, I am living in the fullness
of a promise to myself.
Scar tissue hardens over the memory
of the doctor who, as I was going under
for the two for the price of one
endoscopy and colonoscopy,
said to the interns circling like crows
We probably won’t find anything
but too much fat.
Too much fat is every doctor’s first missile
and it always hits the target
of my heart,
an organ real and symbolic.
I imagine a heartless
body
that’s how I get the courage
to laugh and grab my belly
then painstakingly walk every doctor,
in crisp lines of English
through the muscular needs
of my still
breathing body.
The Days of our Years
She's reached her threescore years and ten
and suddenly she's begun to die
if not in her bones, in her mind,
spreading the dining room table
with the obituary pages, circling
photos of people she knew in her wrinkle-
free years and people she spoke to only
last week in the supermarket while
separating avocados from ripe and may
never ripe even in a dark cupboard
like dreams she's had to give up on.
This month four of her former colleagues
died, all younger than her, and she remembers
the factory fumes, the death-smelling sweet
of undiluted disinfectant bubbling up
in giant blue drums and she wonders
how long she can stave off cancer,
the seemingly inevitable disease
of those who had no choice but to work
where their application was accepted.
There's a section in her closet called funeral
attire: long-sleeved, knee-length dresses,
black, black and white and a fistful of floral
patterns for the ones that say bright colors
where they want the congregation to smile
and clap though there's a mother or child
who cries so loudly the family carries them
outside for a taste of fresh air and even there
their wailing sounds over the sermon
and the festive mood falls down a notch,
until the repast where the liquor line snakes
out the hall and the unaccustomed are the first
to get drunk on the idea they could be next.
Stories abound about what the dead did wrong
or the doctors failed to detect and everyone
goes in for a medical in the days to come,
like my nana who's scanned her whole body
and only found a loss of bone density.
You would think she'd be happy but no,
her mind and body are now in sync
both speeding to total annihilation, so
her house must be in order: folders full
of instructions, bank statements, insurance
policies and when you sit for Sunday dinner,
dead faces staring at you from the folded
newspaper in the corner, she says enjoy
the meal, this could be the last time you taste
my cooking and the roast chicken gets stuck
in your throat and you cough and cough
until you cry.
Self-Portrait as a Catastrophizer
I am holding my heart
in the passenger seat
as you maneuver the city
streets.
A taxi throws itself
in front of us and you swerve
into a bus. Despite my poems
and good deeds, I'm nameless
on the midday news.
At the traffic lights,
you point to a lady standing
on the sidewalk with a batty
as big as a front room
which reminds me...
Did I blow out the candles
around the tub after soaking
in chamomile flowers and baking
soda? Our house is on fire:
passports, photos, Oh God —
the dog. I knew she wouldn't live
long pulling up so much pleasure
from sucking herself all day.
My mother, two doors down,
hears the crackling and arrives
shoeless in her house dress.
Not one of the neighbors
can find a hose and the driver
of the fire engine is in bed
with someone else's woman.
My mother faints and is taken
to the hospital where she'll wait
in a corridor for three days
until they find a bed. No catastrophizing
can get me to tell you she's dead.
My sister must now travel
from overseas but the pilot is drunk,
the mist over the mountains mistaken
for the pale blue of sky. I pray
like our ancestors she learns to fly.
We've left the city behind,
arriving at the beach where
like a bloated sea-creature
I climb into a hammock between
two trees, the breeze loosens a coconut
that knocks me over the head.
You are in the water
fighting a shark no one expected
this close to shore, except me.
Last night I dreamed two people
marrying who exchanged a blue
baby instead of rings.
I told you we should have stayed
home. You tell me there are no
sharks, no coconuts; there is no
fire, no danger.
We are clinging to each other
in the water circled by a school
of silver fish.
You lick my neck,
your tongue is a meat cleaver.
My face floats towards the horizon
and the lifeguard looks away
as my headless body jolts and jerks
to shore where I fall on the sand.
Bury me here.
I've always known my ending
would be without song.
You wake to catch me
staring out the window at dawn
slipping into her orange dress.
What are you thinking?
Nothing my love.
Lie back down and rest.
THE INTERVIEW
This interview was conducted between Tanya Shirley and Jae Nichelle on January 25th, 2025.
Wow, these poems are captivating. Thank you for sharing them. I noticed a throughline of death here—from learning to “not see a tunnel leading to death” in the poem “Marriage” to end-of-life planning in “The Days of our Years.” Yet, the tone in your work is not despairing. These poems are full of tenderness and love. Do you have any philosophies on death and grief that help you cope with them?
Thank you. I don’t fear my own death but I still struggle with the knowledge that dealing with the death of loved ones is a part of our experience here on earth and the more you love someone, the more intense the grief. Poetry is my way of practicing grief, learning to sit with it in order to grow in my appreciation of it as an inescapable part of life. I have no profound philosophy except to say that poetry allows me to access language as a coping mechanism even while understanding the limitations of language in the face of grief.
In “Self-Portrait as a Catastrophizer,” there’s a line that reads “Despite my poems/ and good deeds, I'm nameless/ on the midday news.” Whew. As a writer, what are your feelings about the idea of legacy? How do you hope to be remembered?
Honestly, I will be dead so I don’t worry about legacy in that way because unless I have the good fortune of being a ghost, I won’t know what’s being said about me when I die. I’m more interested in doing my best to lift people up, to tell their stories, to walk in my purpose and truth, and to nurture other writers while I am alive. If my books live on after I’m gone, that’s great. If they get buried alongside me, I won’t even know, so that’s fine as well.
What has been your most surprising career milestone thus far?
Hmmm…I take none of it for granted. Just the other day, a man sitting on the sidewalk in the middle of New Kingston told me I was his favorite poet and that meant as much to me as hearing that my poetry was being taught at a university in Italy. I will say that the two days poetry made me bawl my eyes out were my two book launches in 2009 and 2015 in Jamaica when on both occasions, there were over 200 people in attendance which is usually unheard of for poetry launches. The big moments and the small moments —— they all surprise me.
In a 2012 interview, you mentioned that you used to dance and that dance and music inform your writing style. What is your relationship to dance these days?
My relationship to dance has changed because of a chronic medical condition. I can no longer perform on a stage but I can dance around my house in small bursts and those moments remind me that the body always remembers. When I write, I say the words aloud before moving to the next line and I tune in to my breath, my body’s rhythm, its desire to move and I let all of that feed the poem’s direction.
You live and teach in Jamaica, where you’ve spent most of your life. What’s your favorite aspect of your local literary scene?
I have taken a short break after teaching for around twenty years at the tertiary level. I am proud of all the creative writing students I got a chance to teach but I got to the stage where I needed to pour more into my own writing. I’m therefore a little out of the loop. However, I love seeing small groups pop up doing their own thing in terms of building a supportive community because my constant grievance is the lack of sufficient financial aid and opportunities available to writers in my country. So, I love seeing people get together and organize their own literary events, book clubs, workshops, etc.
If you could successfully live on the moon or at the bottom of the ocean, which would you choose? Why?
Definitely the bottom of the ocean. I love the restorative aspect of water. I would spend the time digging up treasures, communing with our ancestors, and learning the magic of sea creatures.
How can people support you right now?
By understanding that writers living in Jamaica are marketable, our stories carry weight and we can travel from here to literary festivals all over the world. When you support writers who live in the Caribbean, I feel supported.
Name another Black woman writer people should know.
I could name so many but since you only asked for one, I have to recommend Professor Lorna Goodison because I would not have given myself permission to be a poet if I had not read her work and then met her during my undergraduate years.
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