If You Would Love Me by Patricia Sheppard

$14.99

 

Ministrations to the dying, spring blossoming in an autumn landscape, the toxic inconstancies of mother love, the sturdy wonder of physical union: and all of these rendered with Hellenic purity, as though in a mineral light. The elegant formal mastery of Patricia Sheppard‘s poems perfectly embody the fire-forged equilibriums of spirit that lie behind them. Negligence and cruelty and time’s erosions may abound in the world, but we find in these pages the one true counterargument: an open heart.

–Linda Gregerson, Caroline Walker Bynum Distinguished University Professor, Department of English, University of Michigan

 

One poem in Patricia Sheppard‘s beautiful first collection refers to the “effective economy” of washing one’s bed sheets while living at the YMCA.  These two words aptly characterize Sheppard’s style.  She never says more than is needed.  Equally eloquent when conjuring either the body or the spirit—”Sex,/immortality, we breathe it in”—these poems evince throughout a solid musical intelligence that’s rare in poetry these days.  But—as the scorching poem about her mother’s death, “I Knew She Would Wait,” makes plain—Sheppard doesn’t shy away from the most demanding, fraught subjects.  “These sounds pierce the heart purely,” she says in “The Whistling Swans.”  That claim rings true for this collection, a book that’s not just promising, but rather a work of settled accomplishment.

–Steven Cramer,  MFA Program in Creative Writing, Lesley University

 

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If You Would Love Me

by Patricia Sheppard

$14.99, paper

978-1-63534-568-1

2018

Patricia Sheppard is a graduate of Yale College, the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop and College of Law.  She is a Visiting Scholar at Brandeis University’s Women’s Studies Research Center.  Her poems have appeared in The Antioch Review, The Hudson Review, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere.

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