The Last Person to Hear Your Voice

by Richard Shelton

Overview

While Shelton has been known primarily for his poems dealing with the landscape of the Southwest and the destruction of that landscape, the poems in this book are much more far-ranging, including many poems dealing with soocial issues (the issue of illegal immigration on our southern border, homelessness), historical events (the war in Iraq, the events of 9/11) and attitudes concerning politics and the environment. The poems are filled with sensory images, engaged in the real world, often ironic or simply off-the-wall, and their tone ranges from deeply sad, as in a requiem for Glen Canyon on the Colorado River, to the wildly funny, as in Brief Communications from My widowed Mother.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822959571
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	02/07/2007
Series:	Pitt Poetry Series
Edition description:	1
Pages:	120
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Richard Shelton is Regents Professor of English at the University of Arizona. He is the author of ten books of poetry and six chapbooks. Shelton is the recipient of numerous awards, including the United States Award from the International Poetry Forum and two NEA Fellowships.

Table of Contents

Children of the New Crusade
It Is Raining     3
The Little Towns of West Texas     5
Texas Water Tastes like Turpentine     7
In Search of History     8
At the Round Earth's Imagined Corners     10
Politics Last Summer     12
Summer's Children     13
Miranda of the Sorrows     15
6 p.m.     17
Destination     18
Borderland     19
Mother of God     20
Downfall Enters     21
Colin Powell Is in Cairo/Madeleine Albright to Join Think Tank     22
Wee Hour     23
Chicago     24
Yes Miss Emily     25
One Morning     27
The Offering     29
Veteran     30
The Pope and the Contortionist
South Paradise     37
Letter from Cuernavaca     39
The Cartography of Loneliness     41
Dichos     43
Here in Mexico     44
Here in Ecuador     45
The Wrong Room     47
King of Roses     48
Lugubrious     50
The Creep     52
Getting On     54
A Cinquain andthe Moon     56
Therapy Session     57
The Golden Jubilee     60
Suburban Life as We Know It
The Examined Life     67
The Glass Slipper     69
The Hole     71
If I Were a Dog     73
The Farm across the Road     75
Brief Communications from My Widowed Mother     77
Let Me Tell the One About     79
Red and Ed and Clyde     81
Canes     83
Eros Turannos, Fred and Jo     85
Catechism When the Kingdom Is in Danger     87
Runaway     89
Those Who Name Birds     90
Green Pastures     92
The Gates of Paradise     94
Lost Languages     95
Light     96
Interview before Departure     97
Confetti     100
Home Place     101
Glen Canyon on the Colorado (1991)     102
Acknowledgments     109

Editorial Reviews

This collection is vintage Shelton. His political poems are mordant, unsparing. His poems about street people reveal an unsuspected dignity in the homeless and a depth of poverty in the rest of us. His desert poems display the odd but compelling logic of one who has gone too far into the wilderness, stayed there too long, and never fully returned.

Tom Hansen

Pointedly political yet richly imagistic, 'The Last Person to Hear Your Voice' functions like a camera in your mind that remembered to take snapshots the last time you traveled the Southwest . . . Shelton's is a book worth savoring.

Tucson Weekly

Richard Shelton is like a visionary mapmaker, drawing the essential connections and passages between the natural and moral world. Rising from 'the unredeemable moment where we live,' here are poems-immediate and expansive with 'the heartbreak of history'-that speak clearly and urgently to our time.

Peter Everwine

By turns comic, surreal, prophetic, Richard Shelton's poems spring from that place in the mind where high seriousness and play are one. The ordinary opens into an extraordinary lament for our human and political condition. And yet I feel too the joy of invention in these lines, that spirited persistence of the lyric voice that makes our darkness tolerable. The Last Person to Hear Your Voice is a compelling and welcome collection.

Alison Hawthorne Deming

A complete, winding exploration of the role of the individual living both among a society of sufferers and against the backdrop of time. Shelton tries to provide light among the darkness, and does so not only by lightening the situation and wrapping himself in humor, but by staring at the dark long enough for his eyes to adjust to the point where he can make out objects in the shadows.

The Adirondack Review

Pointedly political yet richly imagistic, ‘The Last Person to Hear Your Voice’ functions like a camera in your mind that remembered to take snapshots the last time you traveled the Southwest . . . Shelton’s is a book worth savoring.”
—Tucson Weekly


“A complete, winding exploration of the role of the individual living both among a society of sufferers and against the backdrop of time. Shelton tries to provide light among the darkness, and does so not only by lightening the situation and wrapping himself in humor, but by staring at the dark long enough for his eyes to adjust to the point where he can make out objects in the shadows.”
—The Adirondack Review


“By turns comic, surreal, prophetic, Richard Shelton's poems spring from that place in the mind where high seriousness and play are one. The ordinary opens into an extraordinary lament for our human and political condition. And yet I feel too the joy of invention in these lines, that spirited persistence of the lyric voice that makes our darkness tolerable. The Last Person to Hear Your Voice is a compelling and welcome collection.”
—Alison Hawthorne Deming

From the Publisher