Penumbra by Michael Shewmaker (review)

With his debut collection, Penumbra, winner of the 2017 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, Michael Shewmaker joins the ranks of poets such as Erica Dawson, Richie Hofmann, Melissa Range, and Caki Wilkinson who are writing rigorous formal poems that speak in twenty-first-century voices. These are poets who know their way around prosody while proving that there’s nothing old-fashioned about traditional verse; their handling of rhyme and meter feels natural, well-matched to subject matter, their diction contemporary, never bent or inverted to fit the constraints of form.

Penumbra, as its title indicates, is a book preoccupied not with things but with the shadows made by things. As my Merriam-Webster tells me, a penumbra is “a space of partial illumination (as in an eclipse)” or “a surrounding or adjoining region in which something exists in a lesser degree.” Indeed, the speaker in these poems frequently deliberates from a place of modesty or uncertainty, as if he believes himself to be penumbral, partially illuminated or less than. In one of the book’s many terrific sonnets, “The Neighbors Upstairs,” a speaker recalls the sound of his parents’ voices in the room above his:

They only stirred at night while we were sleeping. In a small space that must have mirrored ours, they moved freely between the muted hours— my father’s snoring and my mother’s weeping.

This life above the speaker feels more vivid than his own; it mirrors his existence but is simultaneously more captivating. Snoring. Weeping. The parents have the grandness of “tired gods” who show “no pity” for the son sleeping “beneath them.” Penumbra is filled with strangers such as these—people who are only partially illuminated, distant and mysterious despite their emotional connections. The poem concludes with a rhyming couplet: “But now that I’m older, torn by choices, / it’s difficult to sleep without their voices.” Their indistinct words overheard through an air vent, keep him awake throughout his childhood, instructing him in the ways of longing and maybe of love. Although the parents are flawed—the father oblivious to the mother’s pain, and both seemingly more interested in themselves than in their child—the speaker nonetheless misses existing in the half-light of their relationship.

Doppelgängers. Echoes. Liminal spaces. In “Crop Circles,” the poet writes, “How strange to find them in the failing dark, / to scan the rows for a trace of an answer.” In “Schoolbus Graveyard,” he observes, “At evening when I pass, / I see small hands and faces in the glass.” The poems in Penumbra contain all sorts of mirroring sights and sounds, reflected gestures, duplicative bodies. Even some of the poems set in Shewmaker’s native Texas often present a gauzy, remembered locale, a source of Proustian experience, rather than a place he still calls home. The book also contains a number of compelling persona poems. Shewmaker speaks in the voice of a tattoo artist (“But enough of love. / I work in monochrome. I deal in skulls.”), an automaton, (“I am my father’s son—the sum of all my parts.”), or a stranger on a bench at a bus station (“I thought I saw a younger version / of myself, something kindred in your eyes.”), each act of ventriloquism providing the poet with another opportunity to meditate on the shadows that we inhabit or that inhabit us.

The other darkness that falls across the book is that of death itself. In one of the collection’s best poems, “Digging My Father’s Grave,” the speaker explains that “a son becomes his father / through certain scrims of light.” Using elegant, rhyming tetrameter, Shewmaker considers how a poem may function both as an act of grieving— elegiac—and as a means of burying that which has hurt the speaker for far too long. “How deep is deep enough?” he asks, “How wide?” The poem doesn’t offer an answer. Instead, it ends with this surprising and angry admission: “And though / I tire of this clay, / my father is not dead— / and these are not his hands.” And, yet, the poem...