GLR July-August 2024

tasy, The Wind in the Willows and The Golden Age . He and other male writers, like Henry James, considered The Yellow Book just another outlet for their stories. James chose it for one of his queerest tales, “The Death of the Lion,” in which the gay pro tégé of a famous novelist makes a surprising discovery at a lit erary country house. As for Beardsley, after he was fired, in effect, for being gay, he and his entire circle moved on to a new venue, TheSavoy , which soon surpassed its predecessor in dar ing and æsthetic appeal. But for many women, The Yellow Book was a crucial step in their communication with each other and with the world. Decadent Women: Yellow Book Lives is a surprisingly read able, even page-turning, book. Jad Adams has researched deeply into an under-studied pocket of literary women and queer literary life in Britain. He presents their portraits with the narrative sweep of a fine novel, or perhaps a novel of linked stories. The book is profusely illustrated with useful and clever graphics and photographs of these remarkable women and their creations.

gle with two men. Several of the women’s lives ended tragically, including the physically small Charlotte Mew, described by Virginia Woolf as “the greatest living poetess.” Thwarted in all her lesbian ro mances, she inherited wealth from an uncle, but then lost her friends to the Grim Reaper, fell into despair, and ended up in stitutionalized. Evelyn Sharp became an ardent Suffragette War rior and endured the legal and then financial consequences. Several women lived well into the 20th century, experiencing both world wars and the accompanying poverty. Others, such as Vernon Lee ( Hauntings ) and Ellen Nesbitt Bland ( The Treasure Seekers ), developed solid careers as au thors of the supernatural and young people’s books. Unsurpris ingly, among Lane’s best-selling Bodley Head titles were collections of fairy stories that featured many female contribu tors, as well as Kenneth Grahame’s best-known works of fan Felice Picano’s 1985 novel Ambidestrous: The Secret Lives of Chil dren , has recently been republished by Beautiful Dreamer Press.

No Time for Boring Poetry

A NEW COLLECTION titled The Selected Shepherd is avery welcome arrival that may en courage readers to rediscover an award-winning, fiercely intelligent poet, an thologist, and critic. Gone much too soon at the age of 45, Reginald Shepherd showed in his increasingly stronger collections that he was well on his way to becoming a major force in American poetry.

Judiciously selected by Pulitzer Prize winner Jericho Brown, The Selected Shep herd contains poems from all five of his books and from the posthumous collection Red Clay Weather (2011). Often studded with lyrics, allusions to other poets and poems, Greek myths, parenthetical asides, clarifications, and reversals, his poems were often characterized as “difficult” by

R EGINALD H ARRIS

THE SELECTED SHEPHERD: Poems by Reginald Shepherd Edited by Jericho Brown Univ. of Pi tt sburgh. 168 pages, $30.

critics. Shepherd, however, felt “that most poetry isn’t hard enough, in the sense that it’s not interesting or engaging enough. It doesn’t hold the attention—you read it once or twice and you’ve used it up. That engagement I look for and too often miss is a kind of pleasure, in the words, the rhythms, the pal pable texture of the poem. It’s the opposite of boredom.” Brown’s perceptive introduction makes a persuasive case for Shepherd’s poetry. He discusses the poet’s unmistakable voice and the three major concerns throughout his poetry: the beauty of an endangered natural world, grief over the loss of his mother when he was fourteen, and his erotic love for and at traction to white men. Before going further, let me disclose that I wrote the ency clopedia entry on Reginald Shepherd for Greenwood Publish ing Group’s LGBTQ America Today (2008), and he and I occasionally emailed each other. His substantial messages were always friendly and warm, usually about poetry, of course, and what was happening in his life. He was honest about having health challenges, but never let on exactly how serious his ill nesses were. I regret not thinking to save them. Reginald also got a certain amount of pleasure in beginning and ending mes sages with our shared first name. A number of the poems and numerous lines in The Selected Shepherd have been with me since I first read them: the open ing movement of “The Difficult Music” from his debut Some

Born in New York in 1963 and raised in tenements and housing projects in the Bronx, Shepherd went on to hold two Masters of Fine Arts degrees, from Brown and the University of Iowa. He published five poetry collections in his lifetime, all from the University of Pittsburgh Press.* He also edited two an thologies, The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries and Lyric Postmodernisms , and his work seemed to pop up every where: in numerous anthologies, journals, and four editions of the annual Best American Poetry series. His poem “Pleasure” appeared in the Jan.-Feb. 2003 issue of this magazine. Shep herd was a visiting professor at the University of West Florida, living in Pensacola with his partner Robert Philen, when he died of colon cancer in 2008. ________________________ * The five titles are: Some Are Drowning (chosen by Carolyn Forché for the Associated Writing Programs Award in Poetry); Angel, Inter rupted; Wrong; Otherhood (finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize); and Fata Morgana (winner of the Silver Medal of the 2007 Florida Book Awards). Shepherd was also the author of Orpheus in the Bronx: Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry , with a second collection, A Martian Muse , appearing posthumously in2010. Reginald Harris, a writer and poet based in Brooklyn, is the author of Ten Tongues (2003) and Autogeography (2013). July–August 2024

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