Review: Red Clay Weather

There are quadrants and orbitals of poetry which fit neatly into no category. The first poem I encountered by Reginald Shepherd (from his first collection, Some Are Drowning) startled me completely with its strange intense interiority. It started with a narrative scrap, and then, like a pearl diver taking a breath and stepping over the side, plunged into the aqueous lyric deep. Shepherd has a trust, an ease in, and a commitment to the lyric imagination, which reminds one of Hart Crane’s exultant, heartsick arias.

Listen, for example, to these verses from “I’ve Known the Garden,” which appears in his latest book: “…Pieces of summer / come apart in my hands and I call it // prehistory, sea-shaped rocks / swim in my palm. I call it stratigraphy, / a place of blank road signs / pointing in all directions. I talked them out // of memory, let their stone flags sleep / among the sediments. / There’s a muse for geography / and winter, a muse of fever / and distance, but there’s no afterlife / for them…”

Abstract yet sensuous—like Crane, written more from the ear than the eye, anguished, tender, and always seeking—Shepherd is a free-form amanuensis of inner weather. His images may suggest some relation to surrealism, but their keel is deep in emotional landscape. In this way, his work reminds me of certain other gifted alien songsters, “pure” singers (pure of sense), like Larissa Szporluk, Ralph Angel, and Michael Burkard. Or even the Rilke of Sonnets to Orpheus.

After I read that first book, I quickly got others and learned that Shepherd was a rather uneven poet. Many of the middle poems seem baggy, obscure, abstract, containing beautiful passages tangled with lyrical cul-de-sacs, fog-banks—a natural-enough hazard for such an interior, intuitive poet.

Yet even in his more imploded work, something smoky, turbulent, and always spiritually acute comes through Shepherd’s style. In our pragmatic culture, he is a rare species: a poet genuinely in love with Mystery, conceding to nothing but his inner ear. More importantly, perhaps, they possess their own original mythic vocabulary, full of gods, odysseys, and mythically referenced imperatives. Here is the authoritative, oracular opening of the poem “Next Year in Gomorrah”: “This sentence handed down on a winter beach / by a voice refusing to be anyone’s, words / too certain to be merciful / or kind: No choice is ever pure.”

The narrative of who and what seem relatively unimportant in such a poem. Is this the Sybil channeling the Holy Spirit, the muse commanding the poet? What matters is the emotive trance, and the ceremonial certainty that one is being ushered into a dream narrative; the immersion of music and mythic space.

Shepherd was, one gathers from the work, raised in hardship by a crazy but loving mother, and these poems have the wounded yet intimate register of an intensely isolated and sensitive consciousness. They are lonely middle-of-the-night songs, or tender and strange rainy day solos.

All this makes doubly unfortunate that Shepherd died two years ago at the age of forty-five. Even so, his art life was feverishly productive: five books of poetry, an anthology called New American Poetries, a collection of his own essays on poetics, and other work. The lyrics in Red Clay Weather are original, strange, and beautiful; it may be his best and most consistent collection; these lyrical testimonies move with great, surefooted earnestness and poignant musical clarity from one end to the other.

Here is the closing of “Lincoln Park Apocrypha”: “A private sea of trees, these inabilities / of yellow leaves all pigeon, / sparrow, wren, or finch, plume down // dirty sidewalk, broken glass / of scattered reasons, babble of / wind bent grass, brush stammering /…the rambling green rain unravels.”