Items related to Some Are Drowning (Pitt Poetry Series)
Synopsis
Winner of the 1993 Associated Writing Programs' Award Series in Poetry This poetry feels passionately truthful and his own, a gay young black man adrift between worlds, transcending the fragments of his life in song."--Poetry Flash
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Reviews
Like the Greek myth of Tantalus, whose punishment in Hades was to suffer from thirst while standing in the midst of a lake, Shepherd's first book is, well, tantalizing: his edgy, refined voice seems entirely at ease while swinging between versions of Greek myths, bitter love poems, and explorations into what it means to filter white Western history through a black heritage. This last subject informs Shepherd's best writing. In "Slaves" a white sailor on a sinking slave ship is mockingly eulogized, with chilling effect. Shepherd fathoms such themes without letting potential bathos interrupt the poetry-or, as a narrator puts it, "When shall I be like the swallow, singing the rape of my voice, but singing past the rape, something my own to sing?" This seemingly offhand question resounds through many poems, not always in Shepherd's favor. For example, he often couches poems in Greek mythology, either thematically or metaphorically, when they might be more interesting left to their own devices. At other times, lines like "Desires wide as burning rain forests in Brazil" counter an otherwise clean use of simile. But these are minor grievances in a promising first collection.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
It's easy to understand why Carolyn Forch{‚}e chose this first book of poems to be the 1993 addition to the Associated Writing Programs Series in Poetry and why The Nation gave the author its Discovery Award. Shepherd's work combines youthful exuberance with a mature style that assures his future in the tumultuous world of poetry. If, as he writes, "history has written its ritual tunes and we / have scrawled some moments of / conversation into damp sand," then his is a beach worth reading. Often he chooses to combine myths, both classic and recent, with stark realism: one poem's subject matter includes the new iconography of homeless men in plaid jackets drinking Old Milwaukee, heart attacks in two-room tenement apartments, and abandoned cities, for instance; and the next, about Columbus, images with older associations-- cannibals descending on fields, Atlantis "dripping in noon light," and sweet trade winds. Comparing a frat boy to Tantalus, a sullen teenager to the Minotaur, and a young socialite to a muse, Shepherd displays subtlety, grace, and, most of all, potential. Elizabeth Gunderson
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