By Reginald Shepherd
"Orpheus within the Bronx not just extols the liberty language gives us; it embodies that freedom, enacting poetry's maximum gift---the strength to acknowledge ourselves as anything except what we're. those bracing arguments have been written by way of a poet who sings."
---James Longenbach
A hugely acute author, student, editor, and critic, Reginald Shepherd brings to his paintings the sensibilities of a classicist and a modern theorist, an heir of the yank excessive modernist canon, and a poet drawing and enjoying on pop culture, whereas concurrently venturing into formal experimentation.
In the essays amassed right here, Shepherd bargains probing meditations unified via a "resolute security of poetry's autonomy, and a party of the liberatory and utopian percentages such autonomy offers." one of the items incorporated are an eloquent autobiographical essay starting up within the frankest phrases the vicissitudes of a Bronx ghetto adolescence; the break out provided through books and "gifted" prestige preserved by way of maternal choice; early loss and the similar of exile; and the formation of the writer's vocation. With a similar frankness that he brings to autobiography, Shepherd additionally units out his purposes for rejecting "identity politics" in poetry as an pointless trammeling of literary mind's eye. His learn of the "urban pastoral," from Baudelaire via Eliot, Crane, and Gwendolyn Brooks, to Shepherd's personal paintings, offers a clean view of where of city panorama in American poetry.
Throughout his essays---as in his poetry---Shepherd juxtaposes unabashed lyricism, old understanding, and in-your-face contemporaneity, bristling with intelligence.
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