The Book of Failures

The Book of Failures by Neil Shepard. Lake Dallas, TX: Madville Publishing, 2024. 91 pp. $18.95 (paper)

Neil Shepard’s ninth book of poems, The Book of Failures, follows his collection of selected poems, How It Is, which gathered a quarter century’s worth of his work. After reading that book, I thought I would know what to expect from Shepard, but this new book startles, astonishes, provides the reader with a rare gift: “a second life / in order to process the first one.” One of the aspects of Shepard’s work that I most admire is its Protean nature; he continually recreates himself rather than, as we see far too often, being a writer who is invariably attempting to recapture an earlier greatness. What we witness in The Book of Failures is a true artist at work, someone who is unsatisfied and always seeking out a new mystery that will, since we are human, never be fully unraveled.

The Book of Failures contains 88 pages of poems, which is fittingly the same number of keys on a piano, since Shepard turns again and again to music for inspiration. (Incidentally, given the times that Shepard considers the night sky in the book, it’s likewise fitting that 88 is also the number of constellations acknowledged by the International Astronomical Union.) But let’s start with that piano. The book features a series of poems shot through with music: pieces featuring Miles Davis, Amy Winehouse and, in a section of a longer sequence of poems about the pandemic (“Lockdown in La Ciotat, France”) Bill Evans and Scott LaFaro. Here sits the author, watching a clip of Evans playing “My Foolish Heart” on YouTube. He sits alone, a quintessential image of lockdown. Listening, watching, isolated, he can’t help but imagine Evans in the act of composition, the pianist

…listening so intently
he hears the spruce soundboard, the maple bridges
and balsam-fir keys, the laminate overlay of mahogany
and rosewood, all communing and remembering their
tree-ness, how it was to sprout leaves, suck up soil minerals,
sing through roots and root hairs to a whole underground
community…
 

How fitting that he’s thinking about returning to the origin of that instrument’s becoming, those root hairs that connect the tree, and thus the piano, to the very source of life. What an apt image of connection in a book that’s filled with examples of how we’ve lost links and bonds, experienced a failure of community. This is one of the failures referenced by the book’s title. But such failings, in our imperfect world, are manifold. In these pages we witness a whole litany of failures and losses, from the incidental aging swan that is no longer able to defend itself against its own passing to a spousal rift in the truly heart-rending, “Mating Behaviors of Storks, Egrets, Humans,” all of which culminate, one might say, in the failure of connection with the poet’s father in the stunning, ten-page, “The Wasting.”

“The Wasting,” in which the poet addresses his father on his death bed, is the kind of poem that makes you close the book and sit, processing the filaments of feeling, before you continue reading. The poem invokes his father, with whom Shepard had a rocky relationship, to speak and possibly to understand his son and his vocation/life calling in a way that he never did throughout his life. Though the father is unresponsive, the fact is that “the last to go/ are your ears.” The moment is simultaneously wise and sad and exultant, but in the framework of the overall book, it resonates with the jazz poems and the deep listening that Shepard has done in other contexts. “They plucked the pacemaker,” Shepard notes when seeing his deceased father’s body, and with the reference to the heart I can’t help thinking back to Evans’s “My Foolish Heart.” This is the heart we fail with, the heart that ultimately fails us. So many fibers thread through this book, it can be pleasantly overwhelming at times. This is not just a collection of the best poems a poet has created over the course of a number of years. No, in The Book of Failures, as in the best of poetry collections, the poems have invisible threads that link to each other so that the lines, as you read them, can almost feel half-remembered.  

No matter the issue at stake—from familial tensions to the near solitude imposed by the pandemic—in an almost alchemical process, Shepard deals with the hardship and trouble by transmitting them into music. What else is there to do in the face of grim history, in the face of failure? “Just let me sing,” Shepard writes. “That’s all I can do.”

If music is a source of solace for the poet, then so is nature. Threaded throughout the book is a deep awareness of the natural world’s nomenclature. Invoking literally dozens of birds (I have 24 as an informal tally) along with herbs and other flora, Shepard seems to thrill in the naming of the world. There’s a certain power in naming things, in keeping track of the flotsam and jetsam of our lives. The poem “Waves Going Out, Waves Coming In,” becomes a litany of the tide’s random gifts, from seaweed to burlap sacks, to mollusks and sea glass to used condoms. The poem turns to the subject of clams and, through them, language, “…their soft anatomies, almost human— / mouth and gut, heart and nerve, intestine, anus, / labial palps (those first antecedents of lips and language)…” Of course, this is about speech and expression and sexuality, but in the context of the surrounding poems I can’t help but think about the tides that go back and forth, from failures and sadness to shadows of reconciliation. All of nature seems a metaphor for the instability of our human interactions, the subtle or not so subtle shifting of mind and mood.

The pleasures of The Book of Failures are too numerous to expound in a handful of paragraphs. The book is as expansive as the geography that it covers, from Vermont fields to the push of the Hudson, to Florida, to Ireland, to France, to name but a few. One of my favorite pieces, “That Sad Clapping,” addresses the applause after a song sung by an unnamed singer (Holiday? Winehouse again?) of “Body and Soul.” Shepard writes:

…God’s no longer
even a slurred order
for another round
of effervescence…
No, he’s just a brace
in the song’s bridge,
where the horn comes in
and bends the tune almost
to breaking, then doesn’t,
leaving it for the singer to do... 

We’re lucky to encounter a singer such as this who, like Shepard, “plucks up a millionth of the mystery, / rolls it around the bones, the throat, / and eases it out, into the world…”

In a wonderful poem about Rodin’s “The Kiss,” the speaker finds the “point where / covenants are made and / broken as two bodies / come together and pull/ apart…” What an apt metaphor for a book that so often expresses what drives rifts between us and others, what makes us fail, but also about what moves us toward union and communion, what makes us overcome and even, possibly, flourish.

Looking out over the mudflats, watching cormorants and killdeer and oystercatchers, Shepard finds it impossible to “track and interpret” the constant inflow of sensory and emotional information. The world’s variety and exuberance simply overwhelms. It can all be too much to take in, too much for words, even in the hands of so capable a poet. When, on this birding expedition, he interacts with a MAGA crew, he’s somewhat assuaged by the fact that people who don’t necessarily agree about much have a common vocabulary. They’re united in “this undefinable/moving thing we’d all agreed to call water / and the wavering moment.”  

The Book of Failures is anything but. Call it a triumph of the effort toward connection, an attempt to defy entropy, a noble effort to name the unnameable. This book is, among these and a myriad of other matters, “…a bridge to the far / side of what makes / feeling felt.”

Reviewer Stephen Cramer's most recent book is The Disintegration Loops, which was a finalist for the Vermont Book Award. His work has appeared in journals such as The American Poetry Review, African American Review, The Yale Review, and Harvard Review.