Book review: An Arctic childhood shapes a poetry of loss and continuance

“Absent Here”

By Bret Shepard; University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024; 80 pages; $18.

Bret Shepard’s achingly beautiful collection of poems, winner of the prestigious Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, is informed throughout by his childhood growing up in villages on Alaska’s North Slope, including Atqasuk and Browerville. The poems are infused with landscape imagery and a sense of loss. The words “absence” and “desire” appear again and again.

Central to the collection is a series of five poems, spread throughout the pages, each titled “Here but Elsewhere.” In the first of these, the narrator waits for a doctor who doesn’t arrive because of a storm-related flight cancellation. “We build us alone. The solitary fox empties / the house of its many things. Days count / pills to pollute their bodies like ice warms / to its desires. Quiet deaths these glaciers. / All the erratics, a kettle lake warms to boil.”

Another of the same title begins “The absence is enormous in the Arctic. / Christian’s mother died when a rope / broke as she helped pull the bowhead / onto the beach, its recoil force enough / to kill what it did the moment it did. / Some deaths create other ways to die.”

It ends with, “As we tilted our cold necks to the floor / one friend stood behind and pushed / hard on the back of our heads to make us / black out. We tried to turn off, inhaling / days with every drug hidden in school / to leave ourselves and return metaphors.”

In an online publication called “what sparks poetry,” Shepard authored an essay about “Here but Elsewhere.” In it, he mentions falling through “sewage-ice” under his home in Browerville and almost drowning, along with other examples, dangerous and otherwise, that contributed to his sense of place. He writes, “Our childhood environments account for a significant percentage of who we are as adults ... As children it felt silly to marvel at the landscape. It was enough to just live. But now I look back and think about what was unexpressed to friends or written off with sarcasm, tools of emotional survival, and I try to find language for what I feel, hoping that what I felt then is something that I can recover (from) now.”

Indeed, there’s a certain amount of trauma referenced in the collection. In “Landscape with Removal” Shepard mentions a time when “a borough crew dismantled aboveground utilidors / that carried our water and sewage from Browerville apartments,” buildings in disorder, and an ice road shaping order.

Midway in this tercet that looks on the page like three building blocks, we read, “One March before the utilidors were torn / apart, my father died in Atqasuk’s gymnasium.” (A Google search finds that his father, a history teacher and coach, died from a heart attack in 1989.)

Shepard mentions sons of his own in other poems, including in one of the “Here but Elsewhere” poems. “Proof: my son tells me he saw my father / last night as he slept. He doesn’t know dream. / I show him a picture of my dad standing / on a fishing boat, Kodiak in the background— / his bearded face smiles back. Yeah, that’s him, / your dad. And he knows you are my dad, too.”

Like that poignant moment, there are many examples of captured beauty and compassion in “Absent Here.” The first section of “Outside (of Life)” reads “Dark adaptation in December, tundra and the distant / remix of daylight—whatever it is that you are here / is broken, so you must survive your life—this skin / clinging so hard to itself against wind and clouds or fog—.”

Other poems reference Shepard’s whiteness within a land and culture he wasn’t born to. “Territories” begins with an epigraph about language loss. Shepard writes, “I’m missing a language for what is lost. / Tundra. Tundra. Tundra. Tundra.” And then, “I was raised without trees. In absence / and then out of nothing, Tundra. / I don’t have a language that isn’t white.”

Bret Shepard, although he has published poems in many top journals and has authored one other prize-winning full-length volume (“Place Where Presence Was”) and two chapbooks, is not well-known in Alaska. He earned both an MFA and Ph.D. in other states and currently lives outside of Philadelphia, where he teaches college English. The art he’s created from his formative years in Alaska deserves to be recognized here and elsewhere both for its elegant fierceness and its contributions to understanding the place each of us holds in the world.

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