Otherhood: Poems (Pitt Poetry Series) [Paperback]

Reginald Shepherd (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

In this ambitious collection, Shepherd weaves together images of contemporary urban life and studied, even studious, expressions of classical myth. The effect of this meshing is to enliven both strands, so that, for instance, the mythic Sol Invictus, the unconquerable sun, literally illuminates the cityscape through which Shepherd moves. Hardly abandoning the homoerotic passion so sensuously prominent in his critically acclaimed earlier books, Angel, Interrupted (1996), and Wrong (1999), he creates a sweeping context for it. Solar references abound, as when Icarus, the young man who flew too close to the sun, and the decadent demigod Elagabal meet Apollo and Daphne. But sunlight is not, as for many writers who employ such archetypal schemas, a corollary to disembodied reason. Instead, Shepherd reminds us how, in nature, sunlight energizes plant life; the poems are positively jungly with botanical references employed as if they were incantations. A book worth reading and rereading. Patricia Monaghan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

“A poet who undeniably attempts and achieves more in each new book than the last. . . . dazzles the reader . . . With four books in the past decade, [he] has established himself as one of the great poets of his generation.”
--Crab Orchard Review

“[Shepherd’s] gifts are admirable in their abundance and their brilliance. “
--American Book Review

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 112 pages
• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press; 1 edition (February 12, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0822957973
• ISBN-13: 978-0822957973
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #715,342 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars stunning work, July 18, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Otherhood: Poems (Pitt Poetry Series) (Paperback)

It's easy to see why Bin Ramke says of Reginald Shepherd that "no poet of his generation brings more intelligence, passion, wit, and necessary madness to poetry." For my money, Shepherd is really the finest poet of his generation. In Otherhood, his fourth book in nine years, one encounters an extraordinary intellect, and a nearly flawless ear: a master of free verse whose epistemological and formal rigor enables him to write some of the most ambitious and erudite poetry I've read in years. The deep knowledge of classical literature that has informed his work since Some Are Drowning enables Shepherd to encompass the complexities of history, language and the self, leading the reader into the deeper strata of conflicting narratives that script, if invisibly, our lives.

Shepherd is also a remarkably gifted observer of the natural world and of the intricate patterns of history inscribed on it over generations, as in lines like these from "Lighthouse Wreckage" (a poem that subtly alludes to, but is more complex, finally, than Arnold's "Dover Beach"):

1.

"Tanker run aground on shoals of disbelief,
pieces of tanker everywhere, oil
overturned on television, filming white walls
with blue clouds, strangled cormorants. Off-white,

2.

stained archipelago, glyph inked across salt
water stilled to stone, a myth of maps. A fragment

3.

of the Roman lighthouse at Dover
survives, shudder of sedimentary rock
a bluff, promise unkept...

In other poems such as "Occurrences across the Chromatic Scale," Shepherd creates a paradoxical poetics, a belated and elegiac carpe diem that requires us to confront our own histories of desire. Along the way, he writes a poem worthy of Hopkins in which metrical skill allows us to see through the veil of language to the natural world:

"Birds, for example, remembered
fluttering torn terms, congregations

shimmer of hummingbirds
but when does one see more than one

tumbling bright flesh (sky
at hand) pleating afternoon, banking

on mere atmosphere, primary
colors dividing white into

three clean halves (red, green,
blue-bitter berries rasp, crabapples

crush underfoot), the spectrum
says don't stop there

(smudged light a lapse of attention)
there's never enough world for you"

Otherhood gives us enough world.

5.0 out of 5 stars Otherhood, June 24, 2009

By 

Steven C. Thedford "Author-Nobody Told Me It ... - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Otherhood: Poems (Pitt Poetry Series) (Paperback)

Reginald Shepherd,a prolific poet, takes the reader into a wide ride of escapades in Otherhood. In other words, he suspends you in different worlds-Elagabal, Egypt, Rome, Cygnus. More than that, his words are often shocking and uncomfortable. For instance, in his poem "Hygiene" Shepherd reminds African American men of the horrors of Jeffery Dahmer and their secret desire to sleep with white men. Finally, throughout the book Shepherd exposes himself, he reveals the naked truth.

Steven C. Thedford
Author
Nobody Told Me It Was Like This