Poetry Review: 'The Book of Failures,' Neil Shepard

Neil Shepard | The Book of Failures by Neil Shepard, Madville Publishing, 91 pages. $18.95. Credit: Courtesy

To Neil Shepard, “failure” is not a dirty word. Personal flaws, social flubs, cosmic chaos — the former director of the writing program at Vermont Studio Center and founding editor of Green Mountains Review sprints through the gauntlet in his crackling ninth poetry collection, The Book of Failures.

Moments of pastoral bliss are nestled within the first few poems, but the collection really begins to pop when Shepard dissects the delicate truce between him and his father, deftly employing rhetorical questions to reconcile a lifelong gulf:

Don’t we all want a second childhood

refunded at the end of days?

In “The Wasting,” a phenomenal nine-page elegy that closes the first section, Shepard delves into repression, generational divide and patriarchal disappointment. But the poet’s hostility slowly softens as his father falls deeper into the throes of senility. Soon, questions become answers, and volcanic resentment simmers as what once seemed impossible — intimacy and empathy — is within reach:

I who had lived with him had so much un-

resolved, so much deep, unacknowledged…

whatever it is that tears the world apart—

from him to me, from me to him—till death

us do part, so help me God I do have it.

The collection is not all familial doom and gloom. Later pieces pair wonderment at the natural world with the transcendence of art. Shepard wants us to savor, coax, call and respond to something beyond ourselves — to God, Bill Evans, bluebells, Auguste Rodin, cormorants. With kinetic intensity, he leads the reader on a path of discovery, connecting our primal selves to the world’s unfathomable beauty.

By the closing pages, we are in Künstlerroman territory, the narrative of an artist’s maturity. Here, we encounter a writer in his seventh decade, in pandemic lockdown in Europe, reflecting on the absurdity of artistic ego during global turmoil, the understanding of immateriality. This is a seasoned poet offering a clear vision, an elevation, a hymn:

And some smells are so old

they go back before the brawn

evolved to brain—back

when game was in the wind,

the nest egg in the canopy—

back when we were little

more than moss and duff

and all our senses snuffed

and touched through tendrils—

and back before when starfish

sensed the stars in salt, and

electric jolts of jellyfish touched

the cosmic materials—

back when the sea was fresh.

The Book of Failures revels in its raucous confessions — 37 ecstatic poems of brazen complaint, celebration and rejection. These poems exult in a cavalcade of ideas from artistic personae — from Shepard himself to Amy Winehouse to James Wright to Dorianne Laux — and the purity and imperfection of the wild world. Then they circle back to every poet’s inevitable end point: mortality. This is elegy as rant and rhapsody, closure as call to action, a dying father unable to speak, an aging son finally able to linger and listen, a poet willing to eclipse the self to step back and marvel at wonders great and small.

Shepard speaks on Sunday, October 20, 11 a.m., at 118 Elliot in Brattleboro as part of the Brattleboro Literary Festival, brattleborolitfest.org; Wednesday, October 30, 7 p.m., at the Norwich Bookstore, norwichbookstore.com; and Saturday, November 2, 12:30 p.m., at the Fletcher Free Library in Burlington as part of the Green Mountain Book Festival, greenmountainbookfestival.org.

The original print version of this article was headlined “Review: Neil Shepard’s The Book of Failures Crackles With Confessions”