Road to Extinction

Who is Hominid? What role does the title figure play in this fine collection? His first act is to climb “to the highest branch of the brain,” that is, “Up” where Neil Shepard’s poet-self writes at night. Not that the “old beast” represents the poet himself. But he is “kin for sure”—another insomniac, another member of a privileged primate species, though not the subspecies that uses words to speak or write. It is along the thin edge of language that the two personae meet and separate. Hominid, a secret sharer of the poet’s tree-like brain, has “a twig that could pass for a pencil.” He uses it to scratch himself like the primate he is and to poke at “a line of ants that resembles this scratched pentameter.” When the two bipeds meet, “he chooses silence, and I, this speech.” The title poem, with its carefully crafted encounter, ends on the word “speech.” Surprisingly, Hominid then disappears from the book. When I look for him in subsequent poems and don’t find him, I hunt for his tracks. In a work as strongly themed as Hominid Up (2015), the title character would not be thoughtlessly discarded.

But it isn’t thoughtless to let this ten million-year-old, not-quite-man vanish from the work. He is, after all, extinct like all the hominids except Sapiens, the language-users. The brief appearance of our ancient relative is meant to set us thinking about the destiny of all species, especially the one we ourselves belong to. What is happening to us and our fellow animals on this hard-pressed planet? A current of wondering dread runs through the collection as Shepard asks this question. In prophetic poems like “Durations of the Hopi” and “Stone Giant,” Shepard’s answers can be as woeful as they are beautifully written. Reading them is, at times, like watching Walt Whitman’s “A Noiseless Patient Spider” (1900) slide down its silken filament into a pit of hot coals.

This is not to suggest that Hominid Up is a book of relentless jeremiads. Shepard’s assessments of this moment in our evolution include both prodigious nature writing and sharp urban observation. The first poem, set on a tree somewhere in parable country, gives way to a group placed in a specific Upper West Side Manhattan neighborhood, one I happen to know well. I frequent the bakery “At the Corner of Broadway and 105^th” with its smell of chocolate bread. I often encounter the tall panhandler described here, “throat sore from shouting Love! and Hallelujah! over a subway grate.” I recognize the poetic echo in “Woman Crossing Broadway at 106^th”—against the light, in the rain, smoking, resplendent amidst “a mess of mangled umbrellas, blouses doused to diaphanous surprise, breasts or bras revealed.” She has the same transgressive bravado as the street guys crossing William Matthews’s “107^th and Amsterdam,” a mere two blocks away. (Matthews’s son Sebastian makes an appearance in a later section of Hominid Up.)

These are likeable streets of relative comfort and a degree of youthful pizazz, but Shepard juxtaposes the good baguettes and easy informality with an alarming, undermining element he calls The Ailment. While some residents sip cappuccinos and listen to jazz; others nurse tainted lungs, blasted immune systems, and ugly dependencies. They beg for the help they are not receiving from this rich city. As the poet weighs the pros and cons (especially the cons!) of giving them what they ask, he distracts himself from his own helplessness by playing a writerly game—exploring the deep grammar and the etymology of “ail” and “ailment.” His findings are telling, as word roots often are:

…that quaintnoun, ailment, a mild illness,a kind of pain given as it is gotten,

intransitive becomes transitive, as inBecause you ail, you ail me.A thing from which we might all recover:

as we recover the kindred soundof pain—agh—ache a cousin of day,heard the live...