Wrong (review)

Shepherd, Reginald. Wrong. Pitt Poetry Series. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999.

Reginald Shepherd's first books introduced to us a contemporary black American poet concerned with the confounding natures of nonspecific desire, his entree in the erotic desire of a black man for godlike white men. In both Some Are Drowning and Angel, Interrupted, Shepherd turned to classical Greek and Roman myths to explore the relation between subject and object in the creation of desire, as well as to Lacanian-influenced ideas about the significance of the personally and socially-constructed other in the realization of lack and want.

In Wrong, Shepherd's third book, we find many of the same themes present from the first two, but this last book differs from the others in its close attention to the impulses toward aggression inherent in desire. "Harm is in us, and power / to harm," he writes in "Who Owns the Night and Leases Stars," adding, "a stranger's hands staining my body // until I can be found again." And though "everything derives from wreckage, returns / there soon enough" ("About a Boy"), harm is only one of several aggressions, two others the want to have and the want to be. The wreckage is the world burnt and burning in the creation of peculiar landscapes, in the metaphoric geography of each body, and in the consuming from within the blood and its cells by viral intruders. The transience of human life is the transience of the beautiful, and Shepherd's impatience with such ephemeral experience extends to his frustration with the fallibility and elusiveness of language.

Shepherd struggles particularly with his search for illumination, and many of his poems are characterized by a photographer's or painter's eye for detail and visual pattern. Through what he seeks to see, Shepherd questions the "wrongness" of what so captivates him as a writer. In "A Photo of the Berberini Farm," he writes:

. . . . Lucidity, you hold light
upside down against the retina, absent it
of the abstract body. Light
is crossing the street shirtless, light
is flirting with more light: a flaw in the eye.

(Wrong for wanting what I did, wrong too
for never getting it: not gods
but men, walking like gods, talking
that way but not to me. Never
and then again only to me. Speak, light.)

Wrong moves toward the description of mythic encounters, apparently erotic but perhaps even more intimate. In the concluding poem "World," the poet dreams of an ancient thief who gives him an heirloom brooch he has stolen from someone else; the man asks to be allowed to live. It becomes clear--this is the poet's own dream, after all--that the figure is also the poet, and the poet suggests not only that the world has made him into that man, but the poet has to decide finally whether or not to forgive. Shepherd concludes,

       . . . This amulet, charm or medallion
against shames never to be named (except
by me, I must confess, not here) never was
my mother's, never belonged to anyone
I could mistake for mine. My mother
had nothing she could hand down; I lost it
centuries ago. In my dream he kissed me (I forgot
to say), begged that I not think evil of him
for what he had to take. Am I the same
man? I was then. I won't forgive you, world
I won't survive.

The object of desire is implicated in the very creation of the poet as subject. Wrong leaves us wondering where this new knowledge about desire, however elusive, will take the poet and his work. And we anticipate with burning interest what Shepherd will show us.

Forrest Hamer

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