Fata Morgana

by Reginald Shepherd

Overview

Fata Morgana mingles personal experience, history, mythology, politics, and natural science to explore the relationships of conception and perception, the self finding its way through a physical and social world not of its own making, but changing the world by its presence.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822991014
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	02/25/2007
Series:	Pitt Poetry Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	112
File size:	518 KB

About the Author

Reginald Shepherd (1963–2008) was a Black, gay poet who grew up in the Bronx and went on to receive two MFAs, one from Brown University and one from the Iowa Writers Workshop. He authored two collections of poetry criticism and six poetry collections, all published by the University of Pittsburgh Press: Red Clay Weather, Fata Morgana, Otherhood, Wrong, Angel, Interrupted, and Some Are Drowning. His work has been widely awarded and anthologized and has appeared in four editions of The Best American Poetry and two Pushcart Prize anthologies. Shepherd received many awards and honors over his career, including grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, among others.

Table of Contents

Contents one Five Feelings for Orpheus Orpheus Plays the Bronx Persephone’s Celestial Sphere How People Disappear For My Mother in Lieu of Mourning Suture Probably Eros Remainder’s Edge Even This two Refrain Pear Tree, Bartlett, Quotations At Weep Things Waiting to Be Dangerous Boy, Allegorically Deployed Brightness Falls Mappa Mundi Cloud Chamber Waterfront You Also, Nightingale three Topograph Some Kind of Osiris Naturalism Kinds of Camouflage Respite Itinerary four Homeric Interim Turandot Narcissus to Echo Snowdrops and Summer Snowflakes, Drooping Eve’s Awakening The Tendency of Dropped Objects to Fall Objects in Mirror Are Closer than They Appear Self-Portrait in the New World Order Dust My Desert While the Temptations Are Singing “I Wish It Would Rain” five Come This Far Thieves Like Us These Are the Things A Handful of Sand The Navigators With the Wind Blowing Through It Light Years Angles of Vision Somewhere Outside of Eden Hesitation Theory One of the Lesser Epics You, Therefore Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

In his intense and mournful fifth collection, Shepherd (Some Are Drowning) mixes myth, TV, street lingo and fidelity to the poetic tradition to create poems that elegize a world which, as in the phenomenon after which the book is titled, is distorted and bent out of shape. Opening with a series of stunning, possibly autobiographical revisions of the Orpheus/Persephone myth ("One death/ or another every day, Tanqueray bottles/ halo the bed and she won't wake up/ all weekend"), Shepherd continues through cautionary tales for an era when almost everything seems unsafe ("I left my love of me behind/ to fester in the slough of cast-off self/ -regard, with other toxic wastes, condoms/ I forgot") and redressed literature for a darkened age ("Ophelia/ sings flowers in hell to all the goodnight/ ladies"). A 9/11 poem confesses to the obsession TV engenders: "I have watched twin towers fall/ a dozen times." Shepherd's rigid stanzas and ear for music in a minor key spread this bad news beautifully. (Feb.)

Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information

Publishers Weekly

In his intense and mournful fifth collection, Shepherd mixes myth, TV, street lingo and fidelity to the poetic tradition to create poems that elegize a world which, as in the phenomenon after which the book is titled, is distorted and bent out of shape. . . Stunning. . . . Shepherd’s rigid stanzas and ear for music in a minor key spread [bad] news beautifully.”
—Publishers Weekly


"At times wistful, at times adventurous, Fata Morgana dares to offer different perspective of Eve's first awakening, hidden history within the Sahara desert, and the dust that is all that remains of humans and stars in the sky alike. Highly recommended."
— Wisconsin Book Watch


”Ultiimately, what makes ‘Fata Morgana’ so heartening is in how it writes its way from lack to love: for it’s knowledge gained by his journey that enables Shepherd’s speaker to declare with such perfect certainty ‘We have come to the end of the body / and the body doesn’t end.”
—Lambda Book Report

From the Publisher