Times Beach is a personal, cultural, and environmental history of the Mississippi watershed, a poetic meditation on how the river is ceaselessly shaped by, and shaping, the lives around it. John Shoptaw guides us from the Mississippi's headwaters in Lake Itasca to its delta in the Gulf of Mexico, from its aboriginal mounds to its present-day dams and levees, weaving together episodes in the life of the river-the New Madrid earthquakes of 1811 and 1812, the great floods of 1927 and 2010, the EPA's eradication of the dioxin-laced town of Times Beach-with his own memories of growing up in the part of southeast Missouri known as the Bootheel.
A pivotal place in Times Beach is Shoptaw's home county of New Madrid, a hardwood floodplain of the Lower Mississippi that, over time, has been drained, logged, and farmed. Still muggy and earthquake prone, "Swampeast Misery" is the poet's autobiographical landscape where he picked cotton, was baptized in a drainage ditch, and worked in the lumber mill. It is also the place his education let him escape, delivering him to a life far away from the swampland to which these poems return. Through the overarching metaphor of undefinedcorrection,undefined Shoptaw associates this education-teaching his dialectal tongue how to talk and write undefinedcorrectlyundefined-with the straightening and regulating of the river by the Army Corps of Engineers.
While informed by his education, Shoptaw's poems regularly erode and evolve their traditional forms. In "Blues Haiku," he crosses the syllabic haiku with the accentual blues tercet; in "Itasca," he parodies Longfellow's learned "Hiawatha"; in "Shuffle," he delivers an outsized variation on the sestina; and, in "Heebie Jeebies," he creates a jazzed rendition of a Miltonic masque. Delightful in its formal invention and informed by an ecopoetic urgency, the poems inTimes Beach preserve history and place in renovative poetry of a high order.
undefinedTimes 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.undefined -Robert Hass, poet laureate of the United States (1995-1997) and author of The Apple Trees at Olema: New and Selected Poems
undefinedTimes 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.undefined -Katie Ford, author ofColosseum and Blood Lyrics
