Customer Reviews

Otherhood: Poems (Pitt Poetry Series)

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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.

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