The Book of Failures
Description
Amid the tensions of family and community and the struggles with desire and disappointment out of which art is made, there is all this profusion: an unstoppable spring, the orange flash of a fox, figs and honey in a Greek harbor town, and a pianist conjuring lost love in his figured solos?our ravenous lives teetering on the edge of today's sadness. In his ninth poetry collection, The Book of Failures, Neil Shepard wanders urban and rural landscapes, from American coastlines to foreign shores, the sudden signposts deciphering what's won, what's lost. Though the tone is often elegiac in this prismatic book of human strivings, it is woven with wit and wisdom enough to illuminate the night sky and bring unexpected levity to his many discoveries.
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Contents
I
1 Milk, Eggs, Bread
3 End of August
4 Horses Standing in Rain
5 Late Fall
6 Under the Radar
7 Spring Poem, NYC
9 And Why Not Be Happy
11 Exiles
12 In the Vilnius Café
13 Going for a Drive
14 Dad's Been Crying Again
16 After the Blizzard
18 The Wasting
II
31 Seagull in a Bowl
32 Rodin's Le Baiser
33 Cezanne's Atelier
35 Great Cities
36 The Band's Visit
38 Waves Going Out, Waves Coming In,
39 Mating Behaviors of Storks, Egrets, Humans
41 Local Freeze
42 Questions for a Cormorant
43 Cormorants in Full Sun
45 Big Winds
46 So What
47 Peacocks, for Evans
49 That Sad Clapping
51 Like Blue Behind a Daytime Moon
53 How She Got That Voice
54 There Is No Sadness
55 Finifugal
III
59 Lines Written at Tyrone Guthrie
67 Staigue Fort
68 Worth
69 Lockdown in La Ciotat
87 Crows in Snow
88 Grudging Spring
90 Acknowledgments
91 About the Author
