"Orpheus within the Bronx not just extols the liberty language gives us; it embodies that freedom, enacting poetry's maximum gift---the energy to acknowledge ourselves as whatever except what we're. those bracing arguments have been written through a poet who sings."
---James Longenbach
A hugely acute author, pupil, editor, and critic, Reginald Shepherd brings to his paintings the sensibilities of a classicist and a latest theorist, an heir of the yank excessive modernist canon, and a poet drawing and taking part in on pop culture, whereas concurrently venturing into formal experimentation.
In the essays gathered right here, Shepherd deals probing meditations unified through a "resolute safeguard of poetry's autonomy, and a party of the liberatory and utopian chances such autonomy offers." one of the items integrated are an eloquent autobiographical essay commencing within the frankest phrases the vicissitudes of a Bronx ghetto formative years; the break out provided through books and "gifted" prestige preserved through maternal decision; early loss and the identical 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 examine 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 information, and in-your-face contemporaneity, bristling with intelligence.
A quantity within the Poets on Poetry sequence, which collects severe works by way of modern poets, collecting jointly the articles, interviews, and publication studies wherein they've got articulated the poetics of a brand new generation.