The Drop is published by Peter Hughes' Oystercatcher Press, and may be ordered here. Thanks, Peter, for publishing it.
The first poem ‘Standing By’, also
appeared on Pages, in my father's memory, but
is also for him, as though he had yet
again succeeded in his ‘foxtrot with death, trying not to tread on her toes’,
as I put it in an earlier poem for him, ‘Schräge Musik’, from The Flashlight Sonata (Twentieth Century
Blues 6). Here's one section of 'The Drop' the second, long poem:
And pumas on the sheet
Of night cats
Padding down sloped shed roofs
Funeral
Scheduled across
Cupped palms between
Tasks against sloping willows
Swooning
Surfeit of joy at the sticky
Sap nothing
Brings this is to obscurity thought
Drops into darkness bats a whole
Here's the blurb:
A
brilliant and vivid elegy that suspends the last breath (‘Oh!’) of a father in
mid-air. Orphic yet compact and bursting with what Blanchot called the
‘patience of pure impatience’, Sheppard approaches his subject—the death of his
own father—with linguistic dare so as to ‘transmute the nothing said / Into the
nothing that could’. Death is woken up, transfigured, reactivated through
language. The Drop is relentlessly tense and intensely affecting.
Reading it is like eavesdropping between the worlds of the living and the dead.
