Scavenging the Country for a Heartbeat

Following the lead of the title of this inaugural collection, these poems are built around the poet's acute sense of hearing. Knowing his marriage is at an end, a man remarks that ``A slight / rumbling comes from somewhere other / than the belly.'' Houses in a suburban neighborhood are described as being ``earshot to earshot.'' The speakers of such poems are hopeless romantics, stubbornly looking toward the heavens: ``The year of Halley's Comet / my wife grew indistinct.'' Shepard continually seeks out the natural world: the farm that is no more, mountains, rivers. Not simply birds but tern, blackbird, raven, whippoorwill, yellow warblers, the bellbird--each set in its proper environment, with its distinctive cry. Yet this learned naturalist can also produce cliches such as ``the sun's promise.'' Too many pieces in this uneven volume seem to float in some netherworld, searching out the grotesque, as in the opening poem, where a boy puts his ear to the tracks to hear the train and subsequently loses the ear. The finest pieces are lyrical gems, summoning emotions that are painful, direct and unclouded with superficial imagery. (Jan.)