Times Beach - (Notre Dame Review Book Prize) by John Shoptaw (Paperback)

About the Book

The poems in Times Beach evoke the cultural and environmental history of the Mississippi watershed and how the river continually shapes the lives around it.

Book Synopsis

Winner of the Notre Dame Review Book Prize, this ambitious collection of poems evokes the cultural and environmental history of the Mississippi watershed and meditates on how its rivers are ceaselessly shaping, and shaped by, the lives around them. John Shoptaw guides us from the Mississippi's headwaters in Lake Itasca to its delta in the Gulf of Mexico, weaving together episodes in the life of the river system--the New Madrid earthquakes, the 1927 flood, the EPA's eradication of the dioxin-laced town of Times Beach--with his own memories of growing up in the Missouri Bootheel: picking cotton, being baptized in a drainage ditch, and working in a lumber mill. Formally renovative, the poems in Times Beach ring the changes on the big muddy place and hymn its everlasting possibilities.

Review Quotes

"John Shoptaw, a poet and professor at Berkeley, has written a book of poems that is as intricate and profound as the Mississippi River with its history, tributaries and deltas. Times Beach is an extremely well-made work that hearkens to Hart Crane and Walt Whitman, rhythm and blues, and the American experience of individual voices." --St. Louis Magazine

"The uncanny combination of experience and skills is what places John Shoptaw at the very summit of nature poets. He anchors his personal experiences in the Bootheel of southeast Missouri as touchstones while he floats the Mississippi watershed through time. An amazing feat." --Foreword Reviews

"There's much to like about Times Beach, even for the casual poetry fan. John Shoptaw's strength is unhooking poetry from its past form--a strategic uncoupling of couplets--to turn the medium into its own monstrous and vital form of energy, all the while telling stories of great depth and enchanting readers with its realism. . . . Shoptaw's 'undercurrents' run deep, and give us a taste of what true originality represents." --PopMatters.com

"Times Beach is brimming, teeming with life. John Shoptaw, with breathtaking expanse and lasting intricacy, somehow writes a book in which we traverse the vastness of the American landscape--its gorgeous yet misguided rivers, its achingly honest and flawed humans, its forgotten bayous and wildlife--with a hand made nimble by reverence. In this, he revivifies American poetry into an optimism that is nearly as infinite as it is pained. This, however, is the only true kind of optimism, and how good it is to have a book of poetry that restores us into that abundance." --Katie Ford, author of Colosseum and Blood Lyrics

"Times Beach is, like most interesting American books, an original. It's about a place, the watershed of the Mississippi River, and it is an ecopoetics. Best, perhaps, to think of it as a hybrid of Hart Crane, the depression photographs of Dorothea Lange, and a nineteenth-century lantern show--they called them 'panoramas'--of the human and environmental history of our mightiest river system. It comes from a deep sense of the rhythms and dialect of a place and from a deeply literary and inventive imagination." --Robert Hass, poet laureate of the United States (1995-1997) and author of The Apple Trees at Olema: New and Selected Poems

"Winner of the Notre Dame Review Book Prize, Times Beach is an ambitious collection of poems by John Shoptaw that evokes the cultural and environmental history of the Mississippi watershed and meditates on how its rivers are ceaselessly shaping, and shaped by, the lives around them . . . . A seminal body of work, Times Beach is very highly recommended for personal, community, and academic library Contemporary American Poetry collections and reading lists." --The Midwest Book Review

About the Author

John Shoptaw teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.