The Book of Failures

Amid the tensions of family and community and the struggles with desire and disappointment out of which art is made, there is all this profusion: an unstoppable spring, the orange flash of a fox, figs and honey in a Greek harbor town, and a pianist conjuring lost love in his figured solos—our ravenous lives teetering on the edge of today’s sadness. In his ninth poetry collection, The Book of Failures, Neil Shepard wanders urban and rural landscapes, from American coastlines to foreign shores, the sudden signposts deciphering what’s won, what’s lost. Though the tone is often elegiac in this prismatic book of human strivings, it is woven with wit and wisdom enough to illuminate the night sky and bring unexpected levity to his many discoveries.

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The Book of Failures

Amid the tensions of family and community and the struggles with desire and disappointment out of which art is made, there is all this profusion: an unstoppable spring, the orange flash of a fox, figs and honey in a Greek harbor town, and a pianist conjuring lost love in his figured solos—our ravenous lives teetering on the edge of today’s sadness. In his ninth poetry collection, The Book of Failures, Neil Shepard wanders urban and rural landscapes, from American coastlines to foreign shores, the sudden signposts deciphering what’s won, what’s lost. Though the tone is often elegiac in this prismatic book of human strivings, it is woven with wit and wisdom enough to illuminate the night sky and bring unexpected levity to his many discoveries.

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The Book of Failures

The Book of Failures

by Neil Shepard
The Book of Failures
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The Book of Failures

The Book of Failures

by Neil Shepard

Overview

Amid the tensions of family and community and the struggles with desire and disappointment out of which art is made, there is all this profusion: an unstoppable spring, the orange flash of a fox, figs and honey in a Greek harbor town, and a pianist conjuring lost love in his figured solos—our ravenous lives teetering on the edge of today’s sadness. In his ninth poetry collection, The Book of Failures, Neil Shepard wanders urban and rural landscapes, from American coastlines to foreign shores, the sudden signposts deciphering what’s won, what’s lost. Though the tone is often elegiac in this prismatic book of human strivings, it is woven with wit and wisdom enough to illuminate the night sky and bring unexpected levity to his many discoveries.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781956440706
Publisher: Madville Publishing
Publication date: 01/16/2024
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 102
File size: 4 MB

About the Author

Neil Shepard’s eighth book, How It Is: Selected Poems, was published in 2018 by Salmon Poetry (Ireland); he edited the anthology Vermont Poets and Their Craft in 2019 (Green Writers Press, VT). His poems appear in Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and Poem-a-Day, as well as in many literary magazines, including Harvard Review, New American Writing, New England Review, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Sewanee Review, and Southern Review. He edited the Green Mountains Review for many years and currently edits the online journal Plant-Human Quarterly. These days, he splits time between Vermont and NYC where, until the pandemic, he taught poetry workshops at Poets House.

Read an Excerpt

UNDER THE RADAR

I’m so low on the priority list

I’m almost trackless.

I don’t use stealth. 

I don’t scramble my signals.

I’m simply living off the grid,

mucking up the markets, gifting     

whatever I make to anyone

with a private grudge against

business as usual. Is that life 

enough? I like it here on the edge

of empire. The sun 

seems to move from one 

horizon to the other

where it rests and shines.

I’d like to move like that—

radiant and removed,

lit with an inner privacy

that sometimes hides

under a bushel,

sometimes shines

outward as a green

ray at sunset, 

sometimes bursts

in auroras that

erase all Earth’s

transmissions.

Table of Contents

Contents

I


1  Milk, Eggs, Bread

3  End of August 

4  Horses Standing in Rain 

5  Late Fall

6  Under the Radar

7  Spring Poem, NYC

9  And Why Not Be Happy

11  Exiles 

12  In the Vilnius Café 

13  Going for a Drive

14  Dad’s Been Crying Again 

16  After the Blizzard

18  The Wasting


II


31  Seagull in a Bowl

32  Rodin’s Le Baiser

33  Cezanne’s Atelier

35  Great Cities

36  The Band’s Visit

38  Waves  Going Out, Waves Coming In, 

39  Mating Behaviors of Storks, Egrets, Humans 

41  Local Freeze  

42  Questions for a Cormorant

43  Cormorants in Full Sun

45  Big Winds

46  So What

47  Peacocks, for Evans

49  That Sad Clapping

51  Like Blue Behind a Daytime Moon 

53  How She Got That Voice

54  There Is No Sadness

55  Finifugal


III

 

59  Lines Written at Tyrone Guthrie

67  Staigue Fort

68  Worth

69  Lockdown in La Ciotat

87  Crows in Snow

88  Grudging Spring 

 

90  Acknowledgments

91    About the Author

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