“A stunning and delicate illustration of spectral snowflakes graces the cover of Ann Shenfield’s A Treatment – muted arctic blues, mauves, pale rose hues set on dull black, as if these crystalline ‘life’ forms, redolent of defining individuality, float in the darkest reaches. Shenfield has painted this Versions of a Snowflake herself, as well as simple and elegant line illustrations throughout the book. There is a treatment available, the cover seems to say, as if the treatment might be by snowflake, beautiful in their evanescence – and a kind of lesson in finitude. In the poems Shenfield offers us the paradox of setting snowflakes – ephemeral, fragile – against the obdurate implacability and apparent permanence of inhumane and violent regimes and institutions such as sexism, the Holocaust, western rationalism, the climate emergency, homelessness, and the treatment of asylum seekers. Stated baldly it seems a goliath battle. But Shenfield’s poems suggest that individual consciousness – honed by poetry as much as by psychoanalysis – can be juxtaposed reparatively against these horrors of cruelty and neglect. Under Shenfield’s hand, snowflake, cloud, poem, and the natural world offer glimmers of hope, demonstrating her aesthetics of holding of personal, family, cultural and collective trauma.”
Anne M Carson, Poet.