Fata Morgana: Poems by Reginald Shepherd

Product Details

Synopsis

Fata Morgana mingles personal experience, history, mythology, politics, and natural science to explore the relationships of conception and perception, the self finding its way through a physical and social world not of its own making, but changing the world by its presence.

Publishers Weekly

In his intense and mournful fifth collection, Shepherd (Some Are Drowning) mixes myth, TV, street lingo and fidelity to the poetic tradition to create poems that elegize a world which, as in the phenomenon after which the book is titled, is distorted and bent out of shape. Opening with a series of stunning, possibly autobiographical revisions of the Orpheus/Persephone myth ("One death/ or another every day, Tanqueray bottles/ halo the bed and she won't wake up/ all weekend"), Shepherd continues through cautionary tales for an era when almost everything seems unsafe ("I left my love of me behind/ to fester in the slough of cast-off self/ -regard, with other toxic wastes, condoms/ I forgot") and redressed literature for a darkened age ("Ophelia/ sings flowers in hell to all the goodnight/ ladies"). A 9/11 poem confesses to the obsession TV engenders: "I have watched twin towers fall/ a dozen times." Shepherd's rigid stanzas and ear for music in a minor key spread this bad news beautifully. (Feb.)

Biography

Reginald Shepherd is the author of four books of poetry: Otherhood, a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; Wrong; Angel, Interrupted; and Some Are Drowning, winner of the Associated Writing Programs' Award. He is the editor of The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries . He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Illinois Arts Council, and the Florida Arts Council, among other awards.