The Robert Sheppard Companion, 2019
The largest single source of critiicism on my work is The Robert Sheppard Companion, eds. James Byrne and Christopher Madden (Shearsman 2019), the first monograph on my work, and covering its full range. After a pithy, funny, playful preface by Charles Bernstein, and a generous introduction by James Byrne, there are essays by Joanne Ashcroft, Ailsa Cox, Nikolai Duffy, Patricia Farrell, Allen Fisher, Robert Hampson, Alison Mark, Christopher Madden, Adam Hampton, Tom Jenks, Mark Scroggins, Zoë Skoulding, and Scott Thurston (obviously not arranged in that alphabetical order).
The roundtable featuring Gilbert Adair, Adrian Clarke, Alan Halsey, Chris McCabe, Geraldine Monk and Sandeep Parmar, is a collection of shorter, looser responses.
There are two interviews with me, conducted by Edmund Hardy and Christopher Madden. Both detailed.
I offer some new poems to the mix, a long ‘toffee of the universe’ piece called ‘The Accordion Book’ and four sonnets from different parts of The English Strain.
There concludes a detailed bibliography of my work, initially compiled by myself but brought to completion (perfection!) by Christopher Madden.
This book shows how far-reaching and generous Sheppard's writing life has been. He has argued and sung for the benefit of an entire community, to keep opening the possibilities of poetry itself. He stands and stands up for the breadth and depth and future of modern poetry. He's written it, written about it, published it; theorized, organised and celebrated. It is not often that innovative practice, political engagement, a thorough knowledge of poetry, and wit are combined in one body of work. But this valuable Companion provides the necessary spread of insights and perspectives to do justice to the extraordinary range of Sheppard's achievements. And that is some achievement in itself. – Peter Hughes
ISBN 9781848616257.
You may buy it here:
https://www.shearsman.com/store/James-Byrne-&-Christopher-Madden-eds-The-Robert-Sheppard-Companion-p121068758
https://www.shearsman.com/store/-p121068758
Or navigate through the Shearsman website: https://www.shearsman.com
Clark Allison, ‘Subtly Anchored in Poetry’ ( a review of The Robert Sheppard Companion), Stride, 30th May 2019, may be read here: http://stridemagazine.blogspot.com/2019/05/subtly-anchored-in-poetry.html
Read: Joey Frances (2017) on the Robert Sheppard Symposium held on March 8th 2017 at Edge Hill, which fed into the 'Companion' in the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry. 9(1), p.11. DOI: http://doi.org/10.16995/biip.40
Watch a very short clip about the 'aesthetic justice' of Robert Sheppard, by Charles Bernstein, recorded in Liverpool for the Sheppard Symposium 2017.
Some General Comments
‘Robert Sheppard commenced operations just as Margaret Thatcher took command, and an uneven power struggle ensued… What I like about The Flashlight Sonata is that its ulterior sophistications never take it out of earshot of ‘the very world which is the world…’ James Keery in PN Review 107, 1996.
‘Robert Sheppard … composed a few words around Liverpool’s status as City of Culture. ‘Their shit’s verdure but that’s OK/ This isn’t a nature poem.’ Sheppard’s near twenty-year epic, Complete Twentieth Century Blues, outweighed the Ringo returns, the showbiz art: he cooked slow and long, with tangy sauces and bits that break the teeth. The city averted its eyes….As if it were the poet’s fault that we want our meat pre-chewed.’ Iain Sinclair in Corridor8: 2011.
Access Scott Thurston's 2010, 'Innovative poetry in Britain today' , Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses (60) , pp. 15-30, here.
Note also that UEA remembers me and Scott at last here.
On Twentieth Century Blues (1989-2000; published 'Complete', Salt, 2008)
‘Interestingly prefaced by a quotation from Kristeva which reads ‘Writing is impossible without some kind of exile’, Robert Sheppard’s ‘Internal Exile’ is a hearing of the internal dissensions within language. He openly exposes the manner in which language disrupts fixed social relations, and this language of disruption becomes and ethical crique. From The Flashlight Sonata, ‘Internal Exile’ becomes a mode of affectivity and action which scatter thoughts and images into different linkages and new alignments with necessarily destroying their materiality.’ Tim Woods in ‘Memory and Ethics in Contemporary Poetry’, in English 49, Summer 2000.
An anonymous review in The Buzz (10/98) of The Lores concluded ‘Not for the faint hearted but then neither is the world’.
‘We have a book, a very exciting and important book, a book written over the last decade of the last century, which ranges across … the whole century. And it does so with a political and (anti)moral commitment, an anger and sense of injustice, combined with control, wit and sheer bloody inventiveness that have been rarely directed by one poet to one long poem or serial poem. … Events are frequently addressed to us in the voice of a female persona… This female interlocutor literally keeps stealing the words, the show, the trajectory of the text. Of all, the oppositioinal presences in the book … she, this pluralist ‘she’, appears to be the most successful subversive, taking the very notion of the poet, the authority of its address, to the ideological and psychological cleaners. … If this is oppositional poetry, a poetry of political resistance, it is also a poetry of the enmeshed individual. Without liberal hand-wringing, this collective utterance fashions a collective responsibility. Twentieth Century Blues is a medley of voices meshed into a system from which no one voice can stand out without itself becoming a voice of the system (the re-appropriated outrage of the celebrity campaigner.’ Keith Jebb in Poetry Salzburg Review 16: Autumn 2009.
Read Todd Nathan Thorpe’s ‘To educate desire’ ‘to repurpose kitch’ here.
‘This is a major poem of serious intent…’ Ian Davidson, Poetry Wales 44/3, Winter 08/09.
John Muckle wrote : ‘Sheppard is a rhizomiste.’ Poetry Review, Vol 94. No 4 Winter 2004/5 : 93-6.
‘In a review of an earlier selection I suggested it was a series of rhizomes, non-linear networks of sprouting connections, a sort of intricate historical potato-patch. That maybe what Sheppard intended, but, as Roy Fisher’s blurb on this handsome book says, it is ‘a cohesive work, outward-looking and rapacious’. Another blurb, by his former student Scott Thurston, states that ‘Sheppard writes with terrifying authority’ and is attempting ‘nothing short of a reeducation of the reader’s desire’, both of which suggest a Poundian thrust and force and ambition –even a certain megalomania. But there is also a happenstance ramshackle friendliness of bricollage about it, and also a kind of bathos. Perhaps it is, after all, closer to what Dr Who recently described as ‘a big ball of wobbly-wobbly, timey-wimey substance’ than the truncated high-architecture of The Cantos. On the other hand he takes on the terror of history all right, and in a fine section called ‘Schrage Musick’ (sic), weaves together family memories and bombed German cities. This kind of concatenation of the personal and the historical works well for him. JohnMuckle PN Review 187, May-June 2009
Warrant Error (Shearsman Books, 2009)
'Robert Sheppard’s political sonnets take as their starting point the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, 9-11 and its spin-offs, further ramifications of the ‘war on terror’, or ‘warrant error’. These events are woven into a fragmentary account of the world economy in meltdown, haunted by the ghosts of fascism and last century’s failed revolutions, all accompanied by a cheesy non-stop erotic cabaret of threadbare Western dreams. Sheppard attempts to realise a globalised consciousness and, in his own inimitable way, to draw these apparently disparate phenomena into an account of early 21st century capitalism geared up for war:
A managed democracy dances in tune
to a spread-cleft litany, as the Queen’s English
warbler, toned to death, unstrews his truth
Hijab porn stars, comedy terrorists, bag-faced boys and Adam Smith, Bin Laden, Blair, Bush, Saddam Hussain and the retired poet laureate – all are to be found flitting through Warrant Error. Sheppard combines the cartoon quality of mass media and the intensity and the affectlessness of an internet data overload; but his sense of the contemporary world is both analytical and powerfully persuasive: the reader has a sense of being dumped amongst the viscera and cultural detritus of a thousand battlefields. His approach to the sonnet is fresh and challenging, yet it’s the sheer impacted condensary of his execution, its worked torsions, devilishly sour humour and relentless verbal ingenuity which drag you, nodding and shaking your head in unequal measure, through this brilliant, disquieting book.' John Muckle. Read the rest here.
Berlin Bursts (Shearsman Books, 2011)
‘He read with startling velocity, manifesting all the assurance of technique and voice of a poet who can add a substantial body of critical work to the armoury of his practice as a poet. None of the energy of his performance is lost when reading the poems yourself on the printed page; Sheppard is an astute technician of the performed and written voice, his poems crafted meticulously as if they were musical scores. But whne the reader glances over these pages, it is not intimidation at the challenge of reading them that is keenly felt; rather, it is the openness of the lines, gesturing beyond their materiality to the world of the reader in ways not always evident in contemporary poetry.’ Christopher Madden in The Wolf 26, spring 2012
‘Berlin Bursts, the eighth instalment in Robert Sheppard’s increasingly impressive oeuvre , is a book at once grounded and fleetingly, particular and universal: moving from Liverpool to Riga, Berlin to Amsterdam, the collection finds time between its travels to meditate separately on the nature of art, death and sexuality. Sheppard speaks consciously from the depoliticised culture of triangulated Europe, but no less to the fundamental demands of the aesthetic for that…. Certainly the robust couplets of Sheppard’s title sequence succeed in self-consciously aestheticising the holocaust in a way that offers a paradoxical and moving ‘testimony’ after the event.’ Ben Hickman in PN Review 204 March-April 2012.
James Keery again, in PN Review 209, Spring 2013, When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry. Mrs T (then still breathing) makes her appearance again, as he states: ‘Robert Sheppard has got it just right in this book.’ ‘An “episodic history” of a “poetic community” to which he has belonged since the advent of Margaret Thatcher, it is temperate, reflective – even, on its own individually negotiated terms, academic – yet unrepentant in its tribal loyalty. There isn’t a smug or mean-spirited word.’ He then delves more generally into the creative environment I was attempting to describe (digging up associations between the New Apocalypse and the British Poetry Revival, which is another story; it is an article rather than a review, and the better for it).
I am particularly pleased he points out my ‘elegant trope’ of ‘human unfinish as the condition of our survival’ (it first occurs in Warrant Error and is carried over into works in progress (I’m toying with Unfinish as the title of a new project.) Anyone who has read the article knows I am dodging his teasing equation of these thoughts ‘open to the “long perspectives” of which the Movement poets went in feat, but also a principled intelligence worthy of the Movement at its best’, but he catches the dying embers of my Levinasian ethicality: ‘Remember: somewhere between the shifting screens of randomly generated computer text and the frost-blown epitaph sculpted onto a headstone for all times lies your responsibility.’
History or Sleep (Shearsman Books, 2015)
A review, by Ian Brinton, on the Tears in the Fence blog may be read here.
'Robert Sheppard’s selected poems from Shearsman Books, History or Sleep, is threaded with a sense of the other. Not ‘The Other’ with its sense of a doppleganger but the other which exists in a type of absence, an ‘autrebiography’ or ‘unwritings’. ….Sheppard’s poetry-frame sets up that haunting … and what was becomes seamlessly what is and the ‘punched hollows’ of the gone are filled with a lyric intensity that twists ‘into a thin-throated flower’ that ‘wavers in the vibrant gulf.'
Ian Brinton, Tears in the Fence
The Drop (Oystercatcher, 2016)
Read Ian Brinton's review on Tears in the Fence blog here. Where he writes: 'Robert Sheppard’s elegy opens with two comments which are central to understanding the nature of this unbridgeable loss. The first page opens with the italicized phrase ‘Standing by’ and the fourth stanza concludes with a reference to ‘Elegy lost in action on the outskirts of an event’. The immeasurability of the gap between NOW and THEN, the living and the dead, means that all writers of elegies stand on the outskirts of an event.'
Petrarch 3 (Crater Press, 2017)
The first review of Petrarch 3 by Alan Baker may no longer be read on Litter. He writes: 'We have an "Iron Maiden" sonnet, a vampire sonnet, a twittersonnet and a sonnet in the voice of Sheppard's satrical poet-persona Wayne Pratt. With the sonnet entitled "Pet" spoken in the voice of a dog we've come a long way from the earnest literal translation, with hilarious results… And so it goes on; funny, irreverent, cutting and inventive, but also very aware of poetics, translation strategies and literary theory; things which few contemporaries could make as entertaining as Sheppard.'
The second response, by Martin Palmer is here.
The third is by Peter Riley. My response to it here includes a few remarks about the whole 'English Strain' project with links to other parts:
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2018/03/peter-riley-on-my-petrarch-3-and-other.html
Twitters for a Lark (Shearsman, 2017)
Norman Jope’s review ‘Games Across Frontiers’ (Twitters for a Lark) appears in Tears in the Fence 69, Spring 2019: 122-127. I rather liked: ‘Each imagined poet is like a fabulous beast, imagined by a tonsured scribe at a bench’ (Norman Jope)
See also Billy Mills: ‘Poetry after Brexit’ (Twitters for a Lark): Elliptical Movements (web), 13th May 2018. Read this review Here
This is joined by Annie Runkel, ‘Twitters for a Lark’, Dundee University Review of the Arts, at https://dura-dundee.org.uk/2019/05/01/twitters-for-a-lark/. in May 2019.
HAP (Knives Forks and Spoons, 2018)
Read a review by Clark Allison here.
Micro Event Space, (Red Ceilings, 2019)
Here for the first review of the book by Alan Baker on Litter. Also posted HERE.
HERE for Ian Seed's micro review on the micro blogging platform Twitter.
Mike Fergusson also realised 'micro' is the way to review it: HERE.
The English Strain (Shearsman, 2021) and Bad Idea (Knives Forks and Spoons, 2021)
Read the first review, by Alan Baker in Litter here: Review - "The English Strain" and "Bad Idea" by Robert Sheppard | Litter (littermagazine.com)
And now there's a second review of both books, here, from Clark Allison, here; https://tearsinthefence.com/2021/04/27/the-english-strain-shearsman-books-by-robert-sheppard-bad-idea-kfs-press-by-robert-sheppard/
Here’s Steven Hanson’s review of Bad Idea on its own, in The Manchester Review of Books: The Problem of England | (wordpress.com)
and (now) in the paper version of the journal, on the first (unpaginated) page of Issue 7: Summer 2021.
Billy Mills reviews both of the books here.
Poetics
Access Scott Thurston’s ‘The Poet as Critic, criticism as poetics: On Barrett Watten and Robert Sheppard here.
Interviews
Read a wide-ranging interview with Edmund Hardy after the publication of The Poetry of Saying here.
Read an interview with Joey Francis, where I talk about Pages magazine and its context here.
Read a general interview with Canadian poet rob mclennan here.
Read the most recent interview with S.J. Fowler here: Maintenant #107 - Robert Sheppard - 3:AM Magazine (3ammagazine.com)
On Critical Works (a selection)
‘A landmark study,’ Benjamin Keatinge remarked reviewing The Poetry of Saying in The European English Messenger.
‘Written by a prominent practitioner and critic of linguistically innovative poetry, it is all at once one of the most wide-ranging, detailed, theoretically-astute and eloquent monographs in its field,’ said Mandy Bloomfield reviewing The Poetry of Saying in The Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry.
Read Patrick Dunagan’s review of my Salt Companion to Lee Harwood here.
PN Review 209: James Keery on When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry:
'A Fine Bold Wicked Thing To Do:
PN Review Print and Online Poetry Magazine - on Robert Sheppard's When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry:'A Fine Bold Wicked Thing To Do' - James Keery - PN Review 209
https://www.pnreview.co.uk/cgi-bin/scribe?item_id=8716
Read Harriet Bloggers on my Innovative Sonnet blogging here!
Buchan-Watts, Sam. Review of The Meaning of Form, appears in Chicago Review 61: 3/4 2018. (It may be found online.)
Editorial
I talk about the various activities (with further links) surrounding the editing and publishing of Atlantic Drift: an anthology of poetry and poetics published by Arc/Edge Hill in September 2017, co-edited with James Byrne, here.
Read the first review by Ian Brinton on the Tears in the Fence website here
Read the second response by Clark Allison on Stride here
Read an online review by Steven Waling here
Read the third review of Atlantic Review in the print journal Poetry London by Mary Jean Chan, or read online here.
It's on the ARC site, and you may also buy the book through that link!
Links to much more about the anthology, the launches, etc, here. Including the London Review of Books Shop one!
The largest single source of critiicism on my work is The Robert Sheppard Companion, eds. James Byrne and Christopher Madden (Shearsman 2019), the first monograph on my work, and covering its full range. After a pithy, funny, playful preface by Charles Bernstein, and a generous introduction by James Byrne, there are essays by Joanne Ashcroft, Ailsa Cox, Nikolai Duffy, Patricia Farrell, Allen Fisher, Robert Hampson, Alison Mark, Christopher Madden, Adam Hampton, Tom Jenks, Mark Scroggins, Zoë Skoulding, and Scott Thurston (obviously not arranged in that alphabetical order).
The roundtable featuring Gilbert Adair, Adrian Clarke, Alan Halsey, Chris McCabe, Geraldine Monk and Sandeep Parmar, is a collection of shorter, looser responses.
There are two interviews with me, conducted by Edmund Hardy and Christopher Madden. Both detailed.
I offer some new poems to the mix, a long ‘toffee of the universe’ piece called ‘The Accordion Book’ and four sonnets from different parts of The English Strain.
There concludes a detailed bibliography of my work, initially compiled by myself but brought to completion (perfection!) by Christopher Madden.
This book shows how far-reaching and generous Sheppard's writing life has been. He has argued and sung for the benefit of an entire community, to keep opening the possibilities of poetry itself. He stands and stands up for the breadth and depth and future of modern poetry. He's written it, written about it, published it; theorized, organised and celebrated. It is not often that innovative practice, political engagement, a thorough knowledge of poetry, and wit are combined in one body of work. But this valuable Companion provides the necessary spread of insights and perspectives to do justice to the extraordinary range of Sheppard's achievements. And that is some achievement in itself. – Peter Hughes
ISBN 9781848616257.
You may buy it here:
https://www.shearsman.com/store/James-Byrne-&-Christopher-Madden-eds-The-Robert-Sheppard-Companion-p121068758
https://www.shearsman.com/store/-p121068758
Or navigate through the Shearsman website: https://www.shearsman.com
Clark Allison, ‘Subtly Anchored in Poetry’ ( a review of The Robert Sheppard Companion), Stride, 30th May 2019, may be read here: http://stridemagazine.blogspot.com/2019/05/subtly-anchored-in-poetry.html
Read: Joey Frances (2017) on the Robert Sheppard Symposium held on March 8th 2017 at Edge Hill, which fed into the 'Companion' in the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry. 9(1), p.11. DOI: http://doi.org/10.16995/biip.40
Watch a very short clip about the 'aesthetic justice' of Robert Sheppard, by Charles Bernstein, recorded in Liverpool for the Sheppard Symposium 2017.
Some General Comments
‘Robert Sheppard commenced operations just as Margaret Thatcher took command, and an uneven power struggle ensued… What I like about The Flashlight Sonata is that its ulterior sophistications never take it out of earshot of ‘the very world which is the world…’ James Keery in PN Review 107, 1996.
‘Robert Sheppard … composed a few words around Liverpool’s status as City of Culture. ‘Their shit’s verdure but that’s OK/ This isn’t a nature poem.’ Sheppard’s near twenty-year epic, Complete Twentieth Century Blues, outweighed the Ringo returns, the showbiz art: he cooked slow and long, with tangy sauces and bits that break the teeth. The city averted its eyes….As if it were the poet’s fault that we want our meat pre-chewed.’ Iain Sinclair in Corridor8: 2011.
Access Scott Thurston's 2010, 'Innovative poetry in Britain today' , Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses (60) , pp. 15-30, here.
Note also that UEA remembers me and Scott at last here.
On Twentieth Century Blues (1989-2000; published 'Complete', Salt, 2008)
‘Interestingly prefaced by a quotation from Kristeva which reads ‘Writing is impossible without some kind of exile’, Robert Sheppard’s ‘Internal Exile’ is a hearing of the internal dissensions within language. He openly exposes the manner in which language disrupts fixed social relations, and this language of disruption becomes and ethical crique. From The Flashlight Sonata, ‘Internal Exile’ becomes a mode of affectivity and action which scatter thoughts and images into different linkages and new alignments with necessarily destroying their materiality.’ Tim Woods in ‘Memory and Ethics in Contemporary Poetry’, in English 49, Summer 2000.
An anonymous review in The Buzz (10/98) of The Lores concluded ‘Not for the faint hearted but then neither is the world’.
‘We have a book, a very exciting and important book, a book written over the last decade of the last century, which ranges across … the whole century. And it does so with a political and (anti)moral commitment, an anger and sense of injustice, combined with control, wit and sheer bloody inventiveness that have been rarely directed by one poet to one long poem or serial poem. … Events are frequently addressed to us in the voice of a female persona… This female interlocutor literally keeps stealing the words, the show, the trajectory of the text. Of all, the oppositioinal presences in the book … she, this pluralist ‘she’, appears to be the most successful subversive, taking the very notion of the poet, the authority of its address, to the ideological and psychological cleaners. … If this is oppositional poetry, a poetry of political resistance, it is also a poetry of the enmeshed individual. Without liberal hand-wringing, this collective utterance fashions a collective responsibility. Twentieth Century Blues is a medley of voices meshed into a system from which no one voice can stand out without itself becoming a voice of the system (the re-appropriated outrage of the celebrity campaigner.’ Keith Jebb in Poetry Salzburg Review 16: Autumn 2009.
Read Todd Nathan Thorpe’s ‘To educate desire’ ‘to repurpose kitch’ here.
‘This is a major poem of serious intent…’ Ian Davidson, Poetry Wales 44/3, Winter 08/09.
John Muckle wrote : ‘Sheppard is a rhizomiste.’ Poetry Review, Vol 94. No 4 Winter 2004/5 : 93-6.
‘In a review of an earlier selection I suggested it was a series of rhizomes, non-linear networks of sprouting connections, a sort of intricate historical potato-patch. That maybe what Sheppard intended, but, as Roy Fisher’s blurb on this handsome book says, it is ‘a cohesive work, outward-looking and rapacious’. Another blurb, by his former student Scott Thurston, states that ‘Sheppard writes with terrifying authority’ and is attempting ‘nothing short of a reeducation of the reader’s desire’, both of which suggest a Poundian thrust and force and ambition –even a certain megalomania. But there is also a happenstance ramshackle friendliness of bricollage about it, and also a kind of bathos. Perhaps it is, after all, closer to what Dr Who recently described as ‘a big ball of wobbly-wobbly, timey-wimey substance’ than the truncated high-architecture of The Cantos. On the other hand he takes on the terror of history all right, and in a fine section called ‘Schrage Musick’ (sic), weaves together family memories and bombed German cities. This kind of concatenation of the personal and the historical works well for him. JohnMuckle PN Review 187, May-June 2009
Warrant Error (Shearsman Books, 2009)
'Robert Sheppard’s political sonnets take as their starting point the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, 9-11 and its spin-offs, further ramifications of the ‘war on terror’, or ‘warrant error’. These events are woven into a fragmentary account of the world economy in meltdown, haunted by the ghosts of fascism and last century’s failed revolutions, all accompanied by a cheesy non-stop erotic cabaret of threadbare Western dreams. Sheppard attempts to realise a globalised consciousness and, in his own inimitable way, to draw these apparently disparate phenomena into an account of early 21st century capitalism geared up for war:
A managed democracy dances in tune
to a spread-cleft litany, as the Queen’s English
warbler, toned to death, unstrews his truth
Hijab porn stars, comedy terrorists, bag-faced boys and Adam Smith, Bin Laden, Blair, Bush, Saddam Hussain and the retired poet laureate – all are to be found flitting through Warrant Error. Sheppard combines the cartoon quality of mass media and the intensity and the affectlessness of an internet data overload; but his sense of the contemporary world is both analytical and powerfully persuasive: the reader has a sense of being dumped amongst the viscera and cultural detritus of a thousand battlefields. His approach to the sonnet is fresh and challenging, yet it’s the sheer impacted condensary of his execution, its worked torsions, devilishly sour humour and relentless verbal ingenuity which drag you, nodding and shaking your head in unequal measure, through this brilliant, disquieting book.' John Muckle. Read the rest here.
Berlin Bursts (Shearsman Books, 2011)
‘He read with startling velocity, manifesting all the assurance of technique and voice of a poet who can add a substantial body of critical work to the armoury of his practice as a poet. None of the energy of his performance is lost when reading the poems yourself on the printed page; Sheppard is an astute technician of the performed and written voice, his poems crafted meticulously as if they were musical scores. But whne the reader glances over these pages, it is not intimidation at the challenge of reading them that is keenly felt; rather, it is the openness of the lines, gesturing beyond their materiality to the world of the reader in ways not always evident in contemporary poetry.’ Christopher Madden in The Wolf 26, spring 2012
‘Berlin Bursts, the eighth instalment in Robert Sheppard’s increasingly impressive oeuvre , is a book at once grounded and fleetingly, particular and universal: moving from Liverpool to Riga, Berlin to Amsterdam, the collection finds time between its travels to meditate separately on the nature of art, death and sexuality. Sheppard speaks consciously from the depoliticised culture of triangulated Europe, but no less to the fundamental demands of the aesthetic for that…. Certainly the robust couplets of Sheppard’s title sequence succeed in self-consciously aestheticising the holocaust in a way that offers a paradoxical and moving ‘testimony’ after the event.’ Ben Hickman in PN Review 204 March-April 2012.
James Keery again, in PN Review 209, Spring 2013, When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry. Mrs T (then still breathing) makes her appearance again, as he states: ‘Robert Sheppard has got it just right in this book.’ ‘An “episodic history” of a “poetic community” to which he has belonged since the advent of Margaret Thatcher, it is temperate, reflective – even, on its own individually negotiated terms, academic – yet unrepentant in its tribal loyalty. There isn’t a smug or mean-spirited word.’ He then delves more generally into the creative environment I was attempting to describe (digging up associations between the New Apocalypse and the British Poetry Revival, which is another story; it is an article rather than a review, and the better for it).
I am particularly pleased he points out my ‘elegant trope’ of ‘human unfinish as the condition of our survival’ (it first occurs in Warrant Error and is carried over into works in progress (I’m toying with Unfinish as the title of a new project.) Anyone who has read the article knows I am dodging his teasing equation of these thoughts ‘open to the “long perspectives” of which the Movement poets went in feat, but also a principled intelligence worthy of the Movement at its best’, but he catches the dying embers of my Levinasian ethicality: ‘Remember: somewhere between the shifting screens of randomly generated computer text and the frost-blown epitaph sculpted onto a headstone for all times lies your responsibility.’
History or Sleep (Shearsman Books, 2015)
A review, by Ian Brinton, on the Tears in the Fence blog may be read here.
'Robert Sheppard’s selected poems from Shearsman Books, History or Sleep, is threaded with a sense of the other. Not ‘The Other’ with its sense of a doppleganger but the other which exists in a type of absence, an ‘autrebiography’ or ‘unwritings’. ….Sheppard’s poetry-frame sets up that haunting … and what was becomes seamlessly what is and the ‘punched hollows’ of the gone are filled with a lyric intensity that twists ‘into a thin-throated flower’ that ‘wavers in the vibrant gulf.'
Ian Brinton, Tears in the Fence
The Drop (Oystercatcher, 2016)
Read Ian Brinton's review on Tears in the Fence blog here. Where he writes: 'Robert Sheppard’s elegy opens with two comments which are central to understanding the nature of this unbridgeable loss. The first page opens with the italicized phrase ‘Standing by’ and the fourth stanza concludes with a reference to ‘Elegy lost in action on the outskirts of an event’. The immeasurability of the gap between NOW and THEN, the living and the dead, means that all writers of elegies stand on the outskirts of an event.'
Petrarch 3 (Crater Press, 2017)
The first review of Petrarch 3 by Alan Baker may no longer be read on Litter. He writes: 'We have an "Iron Maiden" sonnet, a vampire sonnet, a twittersonnet and a sonnet in the voice of Sheppard's satrical poet-persona Wayne Pratt. With the sonnet entitled "Pet" spoken in the voice of a dog we've come a long way from the earnest literal translation, with hilarious results… And so it goes on; funny, irreverent, cutting and inventive, but also very aware of poetics, translation strategies and literary theory; things which few contemporaries could make as entertaining as Sheppard.'
The second response, by Martin Palmer is here.
The third is by Peter Riley. My response to it here includes a few remarks about the whole 'English Strain' project with links to other parts:
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2018/03/peter-riley-on-my-petrarch-3-and-other.html
Twitters for a Lark (Shearsman, 2017)
Norman Jope’s review ‘Games Across Frontiers’ (Twitters for a Lark) appears in Tears in the Fence 69, Spring 2019: 122-127. I rather liked: ‘Each imagined poet is like a fabulous beast, imagined by a tonsured scribe at a bench’ (Norman Jope)
See also Billy Mills: ‘Poetry after Brexit’ (Twitters for a Lark): Elliptical Movements (web), 13th May 2018. Read this review Here
This is joined by Annie Runkel, ‘Twitters for a Lark’, Dundee University Review of the Arts, at https://dura-dundee.org.uk/2019/05/01/twitters-for-a-lark/. in May 2019.
HAP (Knives Forks and Spoons, 2018)
Read a review by Clark Allison here.
Micro Event Space, (Red Ceilings, 2019)
Here for the first review of the book by Alan Baker on Litter. Also posted HERE.
HERE for Ian Seed's micro review on the micro blogging platform Twitter.
Mike Fergusson also realised 'micro' is the way to review it: HERE.
The English Strain (Shearsman, 2021) and Bad Idea (Knives Forks and Spoons, 2021)
Read the first review, by Alan Baker in Litter here: Review - "The English Strain" and "Bad Idea" by Robert Sheppard | Litter (littermagazine.com)
And now there's a second review of both books, here, from Clark Allison, here; https://tearsinthefence.com/2021/04/27/the-english-strain-shearsman-books-by-robert-sheppard-bad-idea-kfs-press-by-robert-sheppard/
Here’s Steven Hanson’s review of Bad Idea on its own, in The Manchester Review of Books: The Problem of England | (wordpress.com)
and (now) in the paper version of the journal, on the first (unpaginated) page of Issue 7: Summer 2021.
Billy Mills reviews both of the books here.
Poetics
Access Scott Thurston’s ‘The Poet as Critic, criticism as poetics: On Barrett Watten and Robert Sheppard here.
Interviews
Read a wide-ranging interview with Edmund Hardy after the publication of The Poetry of Saying here.
Read an interview with Joey Francis, where I talk about Pages magazine and its context here.
Read a general interview with Canadian poet rob mclennan here.
Read the most recent interview with S.J. Fowler here: Maintenant #107 - Robert Sheppard - 3:AM Magazine (3ammagazine.com)
On Critical Works (a selection)
‘A landmark study,’ Benjamin Keatinge remarked reviewing The Poetry of Saying in The European English Messenger.
‘Written by a prominent practitioner and critic of linguistically innovative poetry, it is all at once one of the most wide-ranging, detailed, theoretically-astute and eloquent monographs in its field,’ said Mandy Bloomfield reviewing The Poetry of Saying in The Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry.
Read Patrick Dunagan’s review of my Salt Companion to Lee Harwood here.
PN Review 209: James Keery on When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry:
'A Fine Bold Wicked Thing To Do:
PN Review Print and Online Poetry Magazine - on Robert Sheppard's When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry:'A Fine Bold Wicked Thing To Do' - James Keery - PN Review 209
https://www.pnreview.co.uk/cgi-bin/scribe?item_id=8716
Read Harriet Bloggers on my Innovative Sonnet blogging here!
Buchan-Watts, Sam. Review of The Meaning of Form, appears in Chicago Review 61: 3/4 2018. (It may be found online.)
Editorial
I talk about the various activities (with further links) surrounding the editing and publishing of Atlantic Drift: an anthology of poetry and poetics published by Arc/Edge Hill in September 2017, co-edited with James Byrne, here.
Read the first review by Ian Brinton on the Tears in the Fence website here
Read the second response by Clark Allison on Stride here
Read an online review by Steven Waling here
Read the third review of Atlantic Review in the print journal Poetry London by Mary Jean Chan, or read online here.
It's on the ARC site, and you may also buy the book through that link!
Links to much more about the anthology, the launches, etc, here. Including the London Review of Books Shop one!