Review: “It Will Have Been So Beautiful” by Amanda Shaw

Where to begin when your topics span an impossibly wide range, from self and family to environmental disaster and climate change? If you’re Amanda Shaw, you jump right in and introduce it all within your first six poems (Section I, “What They Said it Was”), creating a map of where your reader will travel. Shaw’s debut collection, It Will Have Been So Beautiful, begins with a childhood in New Hampshire, and ventures as far as Italy, France, and the Swiss Alps, passing points of literary and cultural interest such as Telemachus of mythic ancient Greece and Mark Rudd of anti-war protests in the 1960s. The speaker chats with us along the way, often spontaneously wandering off-road. Shaw is like a tour guide who recommends getting lost in order to appreciate where we have arrived. What may seem a digression intentionally builds a deeper take on the topic at hand.