Around the World in 80 Pages

Take a look at the cover of most books of poetry published today, and you will have very little idea—or worse, a misleading one—of what to expect from the poems that follow. Not so with Neil Shepard’s fourth and latest collection, (T)RAVEL/UN(T)RAVEL. Examine its cover, and you will immediately begin to understand the thematic range and concerns of the poems inside: the cover features a platinum-palladium print photograph titled “Coaster Ruins” (2007) by Minneapolis-based photographer Beth Dow, showing an old-fashioned wooden roller coaster either arising from or disappearing into the floor of what looks strangely like The Parthenon (actually the “Hades” coaster at Mt. Olympus Theme Park in The Wisconsin Dells). The photograph covers the top half of the page, with the word “(T)RAVEL” floating in the sky, and the inverted image of the same photo appearing on the bottom half of the page, somewhat muted and blurred as in the surface of a lake, with the word “UN(T)RAVEL” located near the bottom.

The platinum-palladium photographic process was developed in the late-nineteenth century and lends Dow’s image the late-Victorian, “Grand Tour” quality of photographers like Francis Frith. This “Grand Tour” aspect, with its implied self-indictment of an attitude of too-easy bourgeois tourism in the experience of travel that doesn’t risk the “un-ravelling” of the self Shepard’s poems suggests should occur, is important for an understanding of what the poet is trying to accomplish—what Emerson (referenced frequently in epigraphs and poems scattered throughout the volume) meant when he wrote in “Self-Reliance,”

Traveling is a fool’s paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.

Shepard’s (T)RAVEL/UN(T)RAVEL shares Emerson’s skepticism of travel pursued simply for the sake of novelty. More important for these poems, however, are those two images just described: the coaster and the classical ruin. Juxtaposed as they are in Dow’s photograph, they evoke the Old World/New World, America/not-America binary that lies at the heart of this collection and finds the speaker toggling back and forth—from Paris to Tahiti to China to Mongolia to the Marquesas to Spain to Italy and back again—in an attempt to answer the question of just what is American about himself, and his art.

Of course, it’s not just the cover of a book but what’s going on inside it that counts—and there’s a lot going on between the covers of (T)RAVEL/UN(T)RAVEL. The collection begins with a titular prologue poem (one of six such “(T)RAVEL/UN(T)RAVEL” poems in the book, one at the beginning of each section) cataloging—in vertiginous, Whitmanesque fashion—the mementoes acquired by the recently returned traveler (addressed in the second person) who is here seen still reeling (“un-raveling”) from her adventures:

You’ve met them, travelers half-returned from afar, curled on a couch, comfortable, uncomfortable, worrying gifts from elsewhere— a tattooed cow skull, a friend’s gamelan

The poem—and the collection—opens with an image of dislocated (or, perhaps more accurately, “bi-located”) travelers washed up on the shores of what should be their familiar homeland. Surrounded by the souvenirs they’ve acquired on their far-flung voyages, they cling to these objects in a desperate attempt to recover some stable notion of selfhood, only to discover they can no longer comfortably inhabit either the world to which they’ve returned—or the one they’ve left behind.

Related to this notion of the making and unmaking of the self is the idea of...