We Live and Suffer and Endure

The Book of Failures

by Neil Shepard

Madville Publishing, 2024

reviewed by Carmen Germain                                        

No easy reconciliation appears in Neil Shepard’s ninth poetry collection, The Book of Failures. The poet explores how we fail ourselves, each other, and the world, but his vision is not burdened by blame. While the poems have a conversational tone, there’s also musical language, not surprising given Shepard is also a jazz musician. The work ranges from rural Vermont to New York City to Greece, from Ireland to Corsica to France’s mainland, and brings us full circle back to Vermont. The cover art, a backdrop of constellations reflected in a row boat abandoned among marsh grass, speaks to desolation.  But in reading the poems, we find stillness among the discord of our lives.       

Divided into three sections, the book allows braking distance between the poems.  “Spring Poem, NYC” explores how outward signs of spring “abundant, unstable,  /  Unstoppable” still emerge from concrete and steel,  how “New Jersey, that land so fertile” was spoiled by our attraction to its beauty. “Peacocks, for Evans” honors Bill Evans and his art; he failed his life but left his music, heart-in-hand ballads I’m listening to as I write. “Cormorants in Full Sun” and “Big Winds” engage our broken world, prescient in our current political environment.  “Lockdown in La Ciotat” keeps us in pandemic France.  And lush sound flows through many of these poems; say these lines and you’ll know why poetry emerged from music: “And hear the ocean the undertow the wash  /  Of wave and wind holding the bird aloft.”       

The meditative core of the collection, “The Wasting,” returns us to an earlier poem, “Dad’s Been Crying Again,” where we’re in the company of an emotionally tight and harsh father, no tolerance for crying children: “he’d pinch our arms to teach us /  there’s always another hurt /  so just shut up.” But despite this, we feel a sympathetic tug toward a man who is “95 years of dammed streams.” Who was he, really?  Shepard sculpts in detail:  the father has lived long enough to see chums vanish “into the black vacuum.” He can no longer remember faces, can no longer run through names.  He’s a man in sorrow seen more fully.  About the weeping, “And who can blame him?  And what for?”

In “The Wasting” (a companion to “Dad Is Crying Again),” we witness the profound struggle of the son: he cannot feel the right emotion—certainly not love—toward his father “deep in coma” This is the great sadness of the piece, how the son startles when the hospice volunteers say “We’re here to honor and to love your father.  /  Had I misheard the second infinitive?  /  They said it again:  to honor and to love.”  Then we learn “And thus began all my woe….” 

The son wants to believe that all travesties will be aired at death’s request. Perhaps he wants it like this: those who were a scourge in our lives will sprout bedraggled wings, dust off old wrongs, grasp honesty, utter holy last words. Conscious of the filial role, the son touches his dying father:

I plant my hand on his forehead.  Caress it,
I tell myself.  I turn my hand over
and with the knuckle side, caress his brow.

Talk to him, I tell myself.  No words come.
Say nothing, especially now, in his dying,
that is not true.  Others would say otherwise:

Give comfort at all cost.  My creed, such as
it is, is otherwise from their otherwise.
I will say nothing, or a few vague things:   

Well, here we are, at the end.  You look calm.
I hope you’re calm.  I’ve flown through a storm
to be here.  Can you hear me?  I’m here now 

at the end.  At your end.  At the end.

He “plants” his bony knuckles against his father’s brow, and in this mise-en-scène, the son needs coaching from the self.  Think of all sons and fathers and daughters and mothers with thorny paths that diverged. How peace and final recognition from the one who has been difficult for us are what we hope for as we wait in vigil, knowing silence will be forever “at the end.”

Why so much anger toward this old man? We learn the because, the history of the estrangement:  the father a war hero, the son a war resister. The father’s war songs, the son’s poetry. The father’s dismissal of what the son loves, the art of poetry the “province of the lily-livered, limp-wristed aesthetes”. How the father after making a nonsensical “sissle” sound goaded his son, saying, “This is my art,…. It rhymes with fart. /  That’s your business, isn’t it, big shot?”  

By the end of this meditation, the poet is reconciled with his failure to feel love for his father, a flawed man but a human being:

these memories are all we have of you now; they’re ours until
they pass with us, or pass out of our minds, into timelessness
They are what we know as love for a father, a stranger,

who brought us here to matter, and to the brink of matter.
Rest in peace, father.  You have carried our terror farther
than you could know, simply by being father, carrying

our fears a while in the world,….                        

The last poem in the collection, “Grudging Spring,” returns us where we began in Johnson, Vermont. What sustains us is demonstrated in the neighbor-to-neighbor conflict described in “Milk, Eggs, and Bread,” the poem that opens the book. “[W]e live and  /  suffer and endure” through respect for each other and recognition of our humanity, however flawed. The Book of Failures is poetry that shows us we try. And we try again.

Carmen Germain is the author of a chapbook and three poetry collections, the latest being Life Drawing (MoonPath Press, 2022). Also a visual artist, she has paintings and drawings published in various poetry/art journals, including Aji, Caesura, and Oyster River Pages. She has been a visiting artist/scholar at the American Academy in Rome.

Get The Book of Failures at Madville Publishing      

YouTube video of Neil Shepard at Vermont Public Library (PBS)

Read a Take Five interview with Neil Shepard at Poets House

10 Questions for Neil Shepard at Massachusetts Review

Three Poems by Neil Shepard at Terrain.org