Red Clay Weather
Published on 12. August 2014
103 pages
978-0-8229-7830-5 (ISBN)
Description
"Among other things, Shepherd has always been an elemental poet. His work abounds with the imagery and motifs of water and fire, and while those elements are important here, it is air and earth that are the more dominant elements in this collection. . . .
Clay, red clay in particular, recurs several times throughout the collection as a motif of earth. It is the substance of creation, but always of impermanent things, whether heroes or Babylonian statues with feet of clay, or of things durable but fragile, such as the cuneiform tablets of 'A Parking Lot Just Outside the Ruins of Babylon.'"-Robert Philen, from the Foreword
Clay, red clay in particular, recurs several times throughout the collection as a motif of earth. It is the substance of creation, but always of impermanent things, whether heroes or Babylonian statues with feet of clay, or of things durable but fragile, such as the cuneiform tablets of 'A Parking Lot Just Outside the Ruins of Babylon.'"-Robert Philen, from the Foreword
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Reginald Shepherd
Red Clay Weather
Book
01/2011
University of Pittsburgh Press
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Person
Reginald Shepherd (1963-2008) was a Black, gay poet who grew up in the Bronx and went on to receive two MFAs, one from Brown University and one from the Iowa Writers Workshop. He authored two collections of poetry criticism and six poetry collections, all published by the University of Pittsburgh Press: Red Clay Weather, Fata Morgana, Otherhood, Wrong, Angel, Interrupted, and Some Are Drowning. His work has been widely awarded and anthologized and has appeared in four editions of The Best American Poetry and two Pushcart Prize anthologies. Shepherd received many awards and honors over his career, including grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, among others.
Content
- Intro
- Contents
- Foreword by Robert Philen
- Part I
- Days like Survival
- By the Entrance to Cordova Mall, I Sat Down and Wept
- And Therefore I Have Sailed the Seas and Come
- As If from the Dead
- Attempted Birdcage Number Three
- To Be Free
- The New Life
- Direction of Fall
- My Mother Was No White Dove
- E Lucevan le Stelle
- Experiment V
- In the Badlands
- Water Is a Museum
- Doppelganger Music
- A Shoulder to the Wheel
- In Bloom
- Along with Whatever Has Not Yet Been Named
- To Summon Up a Son
- Given Distance,
- What Nature Doesn't Show
- Wrote for Luck
- My Mother Dated Otis Redding
- Flying
- Falling
- Some Dreams He Forgot
- Part II
- Dead Boys Club
- My Father by the Sea, Supposedly
- A Little Iliad
- Scraps of an Achilles
- On Heroes and Hero Worship
- Play Dead
- My Immortal
- Somewhere Off the Coast of Cyprus
- The New Gods
- If Orpheus Were Honest with Her
- Silent Film, Sound of Glass
- Modernism
- And This She Knows
- A Man Named Property
- Natural Selection
- Once Thought to Have Been Destroyed
- The Shallows
- What It Is to Burn
- I've Known the Garden
- Next Year in Gomorrah
- A Parking Lot Just Outside the Ruins of Babylon
- Alongside the Desiring Machines
- Approximately Nothing
- Kings Go Forth
- Seize the Day
- September Songs
- Song of the Yet-to-Be-Decided
- Soon
- Narcissus Before the Rain
- Lincoln Park Apocrypha
- "God-With-Us"
- Acknowledgments
