The Pleasures of the Natural World

The poems in Neil Shepard's How It Is: Selected Poems are culled from seven volumes the author has published over the past twenty-five years. Shepard taught for many years at Johnson State College in Vermont, where he still lives part of the year. His poetry, rich in wordplay, slant rhyme, and catalogs of flora and fauna, is tempered by a clear and straightforward style of narration, suggesting that Shepard takes as much pleasure in the natural world as he does in telling us stories about the flawed humans who inhabit and destroy it.

In "Easter at Whedons" from Shepard's first collection Scavenging the Country for a Heartbeat (1993), the narrator, grieving his failed marriage, spends the holiday on his friends' farm "because they will not have me Easter alone," and loses himself in the physical work of digging up tubers for the feast:

Digging for Jerusalem artichokeand horseradish root in a sunlit patchwhere spring snows have melted clear.

In the earth, the embittered narrator finds a kind of redemption:

I gnaw at tubers, dirt and all,their buttery, nutty flavor that healsthe tongue of its wounds,the flavor of having lastedall winter beneath the earth….

The resonant names of flowers and birds, their smells, colors, and calls, convey the narrator's ambivalent desire to be rid of human self-consciousness, to break into another state of being, becoming, perhaps, a song bird or a housefly or the rushing waters in "Waterfall at Journey's End," from Shepard's third collection This Far from the Source (2006), wordlessly hissing over "Gneiss, schist, slate," cascading toward

…the place of predelight,before the light

blinked on in our fore-brainsand pained us with fore-knowing…

Over the course of the book, the lines get longer and looser, and the narrator grows more expansive, often meditating on encounters between strangers, neighbors, lovers, and fellow travelers—misunderstandings, small aggressions, negotiations, confrontations, and quotidian human failures to love and empathize. This Far from the Source contains two powerful coming-of-age, or coming-into-consciousness poems, "Teenager 19" and "I'm from Leominster, Couldn't Be Prouder, Can't Hear Me Now, I'll Yell a Little Louder." In "Teenager 19," he recounts the story of a panty raid-turned-vigil that marks the end of his freshman year in college and the dawning of political awareness in the spring of 1970. In "I'm from Leominster, Couldn't Be Prouder, Can't Hear Me Now, I'll Yell a Little Louder," the poet renders the sin of pride and the human tendency toward bigotry and bullying in the chilling form of a high school pep-rally cheer:

In megaphones, in unison, the fanschanting with the cheerleaders, building, building

the round vowels—prouder, louder—and thetwo-line rhyme itself endless until its pitch

raised the rafters. On so little we buildour pride. On mass conviction and massive

self-regard. On so little it crumbles.

In "The Red Stick: White Like Me," also from This Far from the Source, the narrator tells us, with characteristic frankness, of his failed attempt, as a young professor at The University of Louisiana, to be an agent of change when he moves to Baton Rouge and lectures his Southern colleagues (who refer to their black neighbors as "barbarians / at the gates") on "the politics of prosody—free verse's egalitarian sprawl versus / formal verse's upper class refinement." When the narrator moves into a black neighborhood, or rather attempts to, the bartender at the local blues club refuses to serve him. After being schooled, "Get your white ass gone, if you want to keep it," he moves out to where the other white professors, "The Fugitives," live "behind their suburban grilles." It is a story about the white men who dominated twentieth century American poetry, but it is also the story of one man coming to understand

the personal cost of working for change:I didn...