Reginald Shepherd, edited by Jericho Brown. The Selected Shepherd. Pittsburgh: The University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024. 168 pages.


 

Reginald Shepherd is a poet as difficult to grasp as tarot cards and yet is clear as a windpipe. In the much-anticipatedThe Selected Shepherd (University of Pittsburgh Press), Jericho Brown compiles seventy-seven poems from Shepherd’s six collections—from his first Some Are Drowning (1994) to Red Clay Weather(2011), published three years after Shepherd died of cancer in 2008. Shepherd wrote uncompromisingly taxing, often paradoxical poetry, “serious” in the sense that John Barr meansit in his polemic “Is It Poetry or Is It Verse?” That is, poetry “written in pursuit of an open-ended goal. . . seek[ing] to use language, in its full potential, to encompass reality, both external and internal, in the fullness of its complexity.” [1] It is almost impossible to read another poet from his generation who exudes this summation better or more precisely than Shepherd, most especially in his recasting of various Greek mythologies to versify his contemporary interests.

To read Shepherd’s myth-inflected poems is to get an ample lesson in complex self-reverence and rigorously considered examination of the real and relevant as well as a trenchant module in formal intentionality. In “Tantalus in May” from his first collection Some Are Drowning (1994), for instance, we get the first crack at Shepherd’s oppositional propensity when the poem begins with the speaker’s curious ambivalence towards the beauty of spring:

When I look down, I see the season’s blinding flowers,

the usual mesmerizing and repellent artifacts:

a frat boy who turns too sharply from my stare,

a cardinal capturing vision in a lilac bush

on my walk home. (20)

In the mythology, Tantalus betrayed the gods by stealing their nectar and ambrosia and gave them to mortals. For this, he was punished—surrounded by an abundance of both fruits and water he couldn’t taste nor touch. Like Tantalus, Shepherd’s speaker finds himself surrounded by the abundance of spring but unable to fully participate in or enjoy it: “Everywhere fruits dangle / I can’t taste, their branches insurmountable.” (20) But at the heart of this pastoral or seasonal frustration is the mild insinuation of the paradoxical nature of desire as well as the emotional complexity that attends the speaker’s realization of the real. The scene of the poem is filled with as much beauty as with the otherwise, basted evenly with the speaker’s frustration at the catholic inclusivity of spring:

White boys, white flowers,

and foul-mouthed jays, days made of sky-blue boredoms

and everything seen much too clearly:

the utterance itself is adoration, kissing

stolid air. I hate every lovely thing about them. (20)

The speaker desires perfectly, as opposed to imperfectly, formed varieties but knows he can’t have them and sings his frustration as such—clearly, without understatement. Although a victim of his own desire for the perfect, the poet’s attitude seems a departure from, rather than an identification with, the mythical Tantalus who, though favored by the gods, thought he could get away with deceiving them. (“If a man hopes his deeds will escape the gods’ notice,” Pindar writes as a dig at Tantalus in “Olympian 1,” “he is mistaken.”) [2]

If Shepherd is a poet of any particular feeling or phenomenon, then he is first and foremost a poet of desire. This motif rings throughout his poetic exploration and in his engagement with such mythic figures as Narcissus, Adonis Achilles, and others, as his rhetorical fount. In “Narcissus and the Namesake River” from Angel, Interrupted (1996), Shepherd offers us a complete reinterpretation of the myth of Narcissus, saying that “he wasn’t suffering from self-delusion, just a mistake called / identity.” (54) Here, Shepherd’s monumental fealty to form sees him working so closely across the parts of the poem at the very plinth—best words in the best order, of course, but the lineation is handled with stringent craftsmanship—not as a technical circumstance of poetry, but as an interpretive necessity; unpredictable yet purposeful. Since his argument is that Narcissus is vulnerable to desire rather than raptured delusionally by his own image (no way he could have known he’s seeing his own image, Shepherd argues: “there were no mirrors / in those eras”) (54), almost every lineation exudes interpretive energy. For instance, the line, “He fell for,” runs on to, “what he wanted to fall through,” (54) which is a brief yet interesting suspension that mirrors the act of falling itself. Then there is the isolation of the word “wanting” to emphasize its dual, dialectical sense of both lack and desire (and desire growing out of a sense of lacking): “The other is a lack; the self, delusion; / and you’ve got to lose yourself to be found / wanting.” (54)

        Another notable example of Shepherd’s formal commitment beyond his impeccable lineation is his consistency with the parenthesis as a way of thinking actively through poetry. We can count on two hands how many poems don’t feature the poet’s intrusive yet signifying thoughts. Neither a bland, distracting interruption nor feckless attempt at profundity, the parenthesis is employed to such curious and revisionist procedures as to state alternative perspectives, introduce a specific memory, or even challenge his own analysis of his present preoccupation—a quality that is incontrovertibly representative of an endlessly flexible mind challenging itself. In “Narcissus at the Adonis Theatre,” a poem about the strange interplay between the real and the illusionary at the heart of desire, there are two key parenthetical statements in the poem. The first comes after the speaker’s ironic description of a scene in which he somehow, inactively, observes his lover’s “body’s lesser secrets” and “all the disappointments they represent.” (29) Desire, the parenthesis intimates, sets some expectations for us as the ones doing the desiring. For it is in human nature to view and see the desired as nothing short of perfect. However, in the strange combination of chance with logical reflection at a moment of stunning intimacy as the one the speaker is currently in, the truth tends to reveal itself:

(To have done with the likeness

of his body, to have done with his body . . .

The orthodoxies betray me one by one, oh yes, I must

have been blind.) (29)

The speaker finds out that the body of the desired—diminishing as we would later find out in the second key parenthetical: “(He’s worn away until he is that thin, / translucent so the life shows through.)” (29)—belies his outside projection. The speaker is hence hit with a transformative revelation about the nature of desire: that it stands sentinel against truth, or the true image of ourselves, at least if we think we are lacking in any way, just as the sick body of the poem’s subject reveals him to be in a moment of complete intimacy that doubles as a moment of complete vulnerability, too. The ending of the poem—

Scenes stolen by the flickering light

become some clear and credible idea, lucidity

spooled out like film, and then the reel

runs out. I’ll pay to see the play again,

attend the moment you, pale as any mirror,

give your white skin to me. (29-30)

—gives us a sense of why skepticism is Shepherd’s customary response to desire. He yearns for truth to be a condition of being desired but understands how far-fetched that is, at least until we are intimate yet logical in that intimacy enough to see each other for what we truly are. However, handling desire with skepticism, in his poem rather than in life—which is the more difficult avenue—makes him able to see it exactly for what it is. While desire could be destructive, as he sees it to be in one of his most accomplished poems in “Antibody,” it could also be fulfilling, at least to whom it comes not as a lustful indulgence but as a feeling out of necessity, something which is out of our control like Narcissus’s self-love which, according to Shepherd in “Narcissus and the Namesake River,” is an accident of circumstance rather than an entertainment in self-delusion as the self-loving act is widely interpreted.

With an incredible sense of understanding and sympathy, Shepherd addresses the complexity of desire in the course of the poignant yet ravishing propulsion of “Antibody” from his third collection Wrong (1999):

Men who have paid

their brilliant bodies for soul’s desire, a night

or hour, fifteen minutes of skin brushed against

bright skin, burn down to smoke and cinders

shaken over backyard gardens, charred

bone bits sieved out over water. The flat earth

loves them even contaminated, turned over

for no one’s spring. Iris and gentian

spring up like blue flames, discard those parts

more perishable: lips, penises, testicles,

a lick of semen on the tongue, and other things

in the vicinity of sex. Up and down the sidewalk

stroll local gods (see also: saunter, promenade,

parade of possibilities, virtues at play: Sunday

afternoons before tea dance, off-white

evenings kneeling at public urinals, consumed

by what confuses, consuming it

too). (57)

The parenthesis is particularly interesting because it is a technical irony: the brackets are traditionally understood to be a tent, covering inconsequential information which, even if left out, we run the risk of losing nothing essential. This seems to be the case in Shepherd, too, except when it occurs, as it does in the above lines and across the considerable parts of his work, it contains not just more information but consequentially clarifying statements that deepens the sense of the essential thing. The more beautiful than we are accustomed, for instance, is never missing in our lives until we encounter it. The parenthesis is Shepherd’s commendable way of making sure we encounter the more comprehensive, the more beautiful, as well as the more interesting as our primary reading experience of his work. Hence, the final thing that the above parenthesis reveals to us is what seems to be the most curious, and important, thing about the nature of desire: it is confusing yet we are helplessly consumed by it as we consume it in equal measure. As far as desire is concerned, the “men” are the Shepherdian Narcissus, victimized by what was out of their control, by what they didn’t understand and could not foresee. This poem can be regarded as Shepherd’s attempt at grappling with the devastating AIDS crisis of the later part of twentieth century America. The following lines towards the end attests to the fatal and destructive innocence of the people who, at the earliest time of the crisis, contracted the disease [emphasis is mine]:

Later

they take your blood, that tells secrets

it doesn’t know, bodies can refuse

their being such, rushing into someone’s

wish not to be. (58)

            Introducing the book, Jericho Brown hopes we would be upset with his omissions in the selection enough to share and talk about the poems so omitted, and the books in which they appear. On the topic of desire considered so comprehensively by Shepherd through mythological lens, my candidate to this call would be the marvelous “Dead Boys Club” which first appeared in The Pushcart Prize XXXI (2007) before Shepherd’s partner Robert Phillen included it in Red Clay Weatherwhich he edited and published posthumously in 2011. Another poignantly precise poem on the AIDS crisis, the poem is a rather bitter commentary on the nature of desire and risk. At the height of the crisis, gay men in America became Achilles, faced with the equally terrible dilemma of either avoiding intimacy for the preservation of life or partaking in the eternally pleasurable experience of love with lethal consequence:

One boy kissed into bliss

by myth, who can’t remember

his own name, can’t hear

the fatal fact of him

echoing down the busy centuries

he has no time for anymore

(But if you do not go

you will be loved and forgotten) (218) [3]

Perhaps Shepherd’s defining ingeniousness is drawing uncannily precise relation between something as distant as Achilles from the Grecian mythology of bygone century and the AIDS crisis in America of the later twentieth century. It is also one of the origins of his storied difficulty. However, in one of his most accessible moments, in the ending of the poem “A Handful of Sand” from his fifth collection Fata Morgana (2007), he writes: “I will not entirely die.” The only thing clearer to us than this statement is the vocational rigor and comprehensive seriousness that renders, in his case, this statement neither a prophecy nor another poet’s characteristic attempt at self-aggrandizement, but a stab at a precise description of his own future in an ideal world of reading he envisioned through his uncompromisingly difficult writing—a world prepared to be as “hard enough” (ix) as the profitable challenges of his poetry.

To represent such a magnificent imagination of his time to us, Brown does not waste a single page in this selection. Every poem deserves its given space, and despite Brown’s invitation for our revisionist reaction to his supposed inevitable omissions, Shepherd simply wrote too many good and accomplished poems for us to be satisfied with any pickings. Nonetheless, these pickings are some of the best of the bunch. Also representative of Shepherd’s aesthetic interests and moral concerns, they illuminate an imagination whose achievement lies in understanding that the difficult, the interesting, and the beautiful are not naturally estranged. They just need an ambitious poet to help connect their arduous links. Reading this selection is all the evidence we need to conclude that Shepherd is the poet in whose practice the unlikely triad enjoys a perfect marriage.







Notes

---

[1] John Barr, “Is It Poetry or Is It Verse?” (Chicago: Poetry Foundation, 2006), para. 17. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/68681/is-it-poetry-or-is-it-verse

[2] Pindar, The Complete Odes, translated by Anthony Verity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 5.

[3] Bill Henderson, The Pushcart Prize XXXI (New York: Pushcart Prize Fellowship Inc., 2007), 218.