(T)ravel/Un(T)ravel by Neil Shepard (A Review by Brian Fanelli)

Mid-List Press

$13/85 pgs

Neil Shepard’s latest collection of poems, (T)ravel/Un(Travel), takes the reader across the landscape of time and place, through crowded marketplaces of China to sacred temples in Bali that are home to secret burial chambers of monks. The poems crisscross the globe and are crafted with more than enough images and insight to make the reader feel part of the journey.

From the opening poem, “(T)ravel/Un(T)ravel: Monkey Forest Road,” Shepard’s book provides the fine detail and insight of an investigative reporter. Set in Bali, the poem is packed with colorful sensory imagery, including a bustling marketplace “where women smelling of raw fish, their breasts/burst from their shirts/and men hawking/and emptying their nostrils on the sidewalks, shout Mister, mister!” Throughout the collection, Shepard never romanticizes travel, but rather provides as much honest detail and observations as possible, no matter how gritty.

The opening poem and the rest of the collection push beyond well-crafted imagery to reach meditative reflections. In the same poem, the speaker asks himself, “How will I meet/those black eyes begging Mister, mister,” and a few lines later, when contemplating whether or not to visit a holy temple, he wonders, “How will I arrive there unscathed and prepared?/Or will I always arrive scarred and fearful/my meditations unraveling.”

The traveler is also haunted by what he sees, and those images are just as mesmerizing to the reader. The stark images speak of global poverty and need. In the poem “Corfu,” the speaker encounters “beggar-widows” with “eyeless stares,” two black holes for sockets,” and “that last hole/of darkness where the mouth opens in need/the language foreign but familiar to any traveler.” It is clear by the end of the poem how these encounters, these images of beggars on the roadside, will stay with the traveler, even after he eventually returns home.

Shepard uses the varied settings well enough to create meditative reflections and at times to address a moral or philosophical conflict the traveler experiences. He also makes clear how lonely travel can be, and how difficult it can be to trust others along the way. In the poem “The Ancient Walls of San Gusme,” set in Italy, the speaker has another conflict, this time whether or not to trust an Italian lawyer. Maybe it was the fact the stranger was a lawyer, but the speaker confesses that, “Why will I never visit him, never trust him, he who was more/warmly human than my American manners allow?” This is after the lawyer said he wanted to buy the traveler’s book, made a speech about Americans, and applauded the speaker’s piano playing skills. The poem is punctuated perfectly with the line, “Why do I sniff for a trap where there is no trap?/Is there?”

Shepard’s latest collection is also a delight to read because even while painting some of the harshest conditions in the travel poems, he injects some humor. In the poem “Duzi,” set in the Taklamakan Desert of China, a “salt pan of scorching heat,” the speaker’s wife, Kate, is sick and needs to pull over. The speaker implores the bus driver to stop, and when he finally does and Kate releases “green explosions watering the desert,” she earns cheers from men on the bus, and eventually her husband. The laughter and cheers, while embarrassing to Kate, are a sigh of relief, just as the bus “rolls into rain/that makes the desert bloom and cools tempers/all the way to the wine-crazed town of Tupan.”

Besides trekking across the globe, Shephard’s poems also serve as a landscape of literature. Each section of the book begins with a quote from a poet, including William Carlos Williams, Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, and others. This technique is effective in breaking up the travel experiences of the poet. One of the poems, “Keats House, Hampstead Heath,” is a fine tribute to the English Romantic poet and his love affair with Fanny Brawne, whose relationship with Keats suffered due to his poverty and tuberculosis that lead to his death.  Shepard wonderfully depicts the beauty and conflict of their romance when he writes,

As when Fanny breathed beyond the lavender

wall and you alive on the other side began to stir to her scent,

felt the paper-thin cell that held you apart begin to vibrate,

both of you humming up and down your lengths of the first honeyed measures

that would take you through a year- spring’s green heath, summer’s swimming ponds,

before the sphagnum bog browned and arterial blood coughed up from a lung

deposited its bright death warrant on your handkerchief in mid-winter,

sent you southward to your name writ with water.

Like the film Bright Star, a biopic about Keats’ life, Shepard portrays the relationship between Fanny Brawne and John Keats well, both its beauty and its tragedy.

Shepard’s latest offering is well worth the read. His poems are expansive, reflective, and insightful. His eye for detail makes the reader feel part of the journey at all times, and what wonderful journey it is.

*

Brian Fanelli’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Harpur Palate, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Evening Street Review, The Portland Review, Boston Literary Magazine, Indigo Rising Magazine, Chiron Review, and other journals and websites. He is also the author of the chapbook Front Man and has an M.F.A. in creative writing from Wilkes University.