Red Clay Weather

Reviews / Votes

At mid-life, the self starts to dissolve into a more impersonal Self-call it something integrated, individuated, divine. Like those whose names are 'writ on water,' Reginald Shepherd's final poems in this posthumous volume testify to a life courageously lived to the full-an Orphic downstream singing to the end. * Timothy Liu * I'm forever grateful to University of Pittsburgh Press and Robert Philen for Red Clay Weather. Reginald Shepherd's poetry is pearl-like: vulnerable and enduring, an iridescent response to the world's potential threat and damage. His work is exquisite, unabashed, encompassing, real, and all too rare, an extraordinary natural artifact of existence. * Amy Newman * Reginald Shepherd's full contribution to his art and his community will take some time to become clear, but this book goes a long way toward that clarity. These poems are filled with a terrible brilliance, as when he says: 'Nurse says she recognizes me in light's edict.' We who watched the work appear over the decades recognize him here, making his love to the language, sharing his dreams and ambitions for it. * Bin Ramke * These last poems put Shepherd's careerlong synthesis of classical imagery, African-American history and experience, contemporary language, and edgy aesthetics to new purposes. . . . Shepherd was a beloved and controversial poet; his voice will be missed. * <i>Publishers Weekly</i> * Shepard was one of the finest young poets of his generation. Loud, proud, and obssessed with poetry, he knew how to awaken people with its power and how to destroy myths about the limits of language. His five books will stand the test of time as some of the best collections of the last 20 years. * <i>The Bloomsbury Review</i> * ['Red Clay Weather'] 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. * <i>Ploughshares</i> *