A Voice of Rage and Renewal

Burning Shore Reviews, May 2007

By Rob Woodard

The Last Person to Hear Your Voice
Poems
Richard Shelton
University of Pittsburg Press: Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, 109 Pages

For over forty years Richard Shelton has been establishing himself as the unofficial poet laureate of the Arizona desert and in the process has become an extremely important voice of the American west in general. Thru the haunted verse of such classic books as The Tattooed Desert, All The Dirty Words, and The Bus To Veracruz, Shelton has painstaking built up a larger narrative that taps into the deep time of his surrounding desert landscape and the wants and needs of the wounded persons who inhabit it, while also at times finding a hard-won beauty and transcendence that can be absolutely breathtaking.

Even at its brightest, however, Shelton's vision has always been a tough one. Unlike a poet such as, say, Gary Snyder, whose western America is a place of cool breezes and spaces that are as hopeful as they are open, Shelton's west is often one of dead heat and longing, of slowly encroaching death, where the region's vastness does not stoke dreams of freedom so much as mirror the loneliness of human life in such places. Paradoxically, it can also be a playful place, where the moon whispers thru one's open window and the very stones are alive (most humans just mistake them for the non-living because rocks move so damn slowly!). Mostly, though, it is a complicated land where individuals struggle to find meaning as they move thru lives as dry and hard as the surrounding landscape, lives that always seem to be running parallel to ones they believe they should be living.

Or at least that was Richard Shelton's universe for me. After reading The Last Person to Hear Your Voice, his latest collection of poems, I feel there is some serious revision needed in most descriptions of this man's work, as well as a complete reevaluation of his art-for this book would seem to mark a radical change of direction, in subject matter especially, but just as importantly in the tone of his writing.

To put it bluntly, most long-time readers of Richard Shelton will probably find this book to be more than a little bit of a shock. Yes, the timeless brooding desert musings of the past are still to be found here, but much more often than not they are rendered to secondary importance by truly angry missives fired at recent world events, including most conspicuously the happenings of 9/11, the following mania for war, and the current sorry state of current U.S. and world culture.

"Children of the New Crusade," the book's opening section contains the collection's most straight forward, and I would argue, most compelling poems. Mixing dark images that invoke feelings of despair and coming doom with razor-edged attacks on the foolishness that leads to war and needless suffering and death in a broader sense, these twenty poems make create a powerful suite of both rage and also a strange kind of renewal, perhaps symbolized best by the poet's own stance against this rising tide of destruction. Arguably the most daring poem of this section (and the book as a whole) is the de facto title piece "One Morning," which directly takes on the events of 9/11. Poems that address such fresh wounds always run the risk of being less true poems than a kind of poetic journalism, which at worst is maudlin or at best bound by its own time frame.

The plane flies into your future.
The buildings blossom on television.
Summer is over. Winter is approaching,
and a cold rain. Soon the snow will cover
Will the last person
to hear your voice hear your voice again
in the silence as snow falls
on the ground where your ashes are mingled with the ashes of others
in an erasure that can never be erased?

With such strong lines that manage to be both broadly apocalyptic and deeply personal at the same time, Shelton rises above such previously stated pitfalls and creates a moving poem of what is quickly becoming a mythic national tragedy. This is not the best poem to be found in this section, however. Other works rise above it, perhaps because they are less direct. For example, the way the more abstract politics of "Colin Powell is in Cairo / Madeline Albright Joins a Think Tank" flower into more a concrete damning of current administration policies and abilities with lines such as

A bird hits the window as sun pierces the clouds
A heavily flooded area ....
library inundated ...
The president is baffled
by the idea of complete sentence.

that hit just as hard while allowing our minds to drift into more expansive territory. Other high points of this part of the book include "Mother of God," a moving portrait of an illegal alien dying in his attempt to cross the border from Mexico to the United States, and "Politics Last Summer," which turns the evangelical right's own beliefs on their head when "three wise monkeys" demand "an end to the teaching of Darwinism or any / theory that related them even distantly, / to such a debauched creature as man."

In "The Pope and the Contortionist" and "Suburban Life as We Know It," the other two sections of this book, the subject matter is a bit more varied (though there is much more going on in the book's first section in this regard than I have probably implied), with a kind of surreal and/or abstract take on the everyday cruelties and vagaries of life dominating. Though there are lines, stanzas, and even whole poems that seem to miss their mark, overall these two sections are quite strong. Highly representative of these would be the evocative meditation "Cartography of Loneliness," which, as its title implies, uses examples from various landscapes (both "real" and artistic) to explore this bottomless subject. Other examples of extremely effective poems would be "Let Me Tell the One About" and "Red and Ed and Clyde," which are bittersweet portraits of the poet's father and his drinking buddies and the surprisingly profound meaning their barroom-oriented lives ultimately exuded.

In addition to its poems this book also contains a number of pieces that are either outright prose or prose poems, depending on one's interpretation. The inclusion of these works constitute what I feel are the collection's only real flaw, not in their quality (they are all at worst interesting and some are quite wonderful), but because they tend to muddy the water and distract from the surrounding, far more important, poems. Despite this and other scattered weak points, The Last Person to Hear Your Voice is powerful and challenging work that's all the more amazing for its unexpectedness. Though he is now in his seventies, Richard Shelton is revealing himself to be no old poetman resting on his considerable laurels but an artist more vibrant than ever blazing important new trails with his words. Let us hope that this is only the first of many books exploring this profound and unexpected expansion of his voice.

ROB WOODARD is the author of the novels Heaping Stones (2005, Burning Shore Press) and What Love Is (to be published by Burning Shore Press in the summer/fall of 2007). In 2008 Burning Shore Press will be bringing out King of Long Beach, his first volume of poetry. He is currently working on a novel entitled Backwaters of Beauty. He lives in Long Beach, California. Contact:

Copyright © 2007 Rob Woodard.