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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
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From the Back Cover
"Brilliant and elegiac. . . . A writer always conscious of the shadowy borders where myth and history-his own and Western civilization's-mingle. Those borders, classical and contemporary, are the true location of Shepherd's poems, and his newest work crosses and recrosses them, excavates their sites, finds the evidence of the poem at every stratum." -Marilyn Hacker
"Shepherd continues the mining-making mine-of classical texts and textures which has been for so long his forte. . . . No poet of his generation brings more intelligence, passion, wit, and necessary madness to poetry. . . . The most important book yet by this important poet." -Bin Ramke
"True poets give gifts. Reginald Shepherd gives his readers the interest of the world. . . . Shepherd's book is a Song of Songs. . . . A searching back all the way to the place where song comes from." -Allen Grossman
Written in the spaces between otherness and brotherhood, Otherhood combines traditional lyricism with experimentalism, passionate engagement with cold-eyed investigation, and personal details with a depersonalized distance to create a new poetic synthesis.
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