The Last Person to Hear Your Voice
Poems
Richard Shelton
University of Pittsburgh Press: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 109 Pages
Reviewed by Rob Woodard
For over forty years Richard Shelton has been establishing himself as the unofficial poet laureate of the Arizona desert and in the process has become an extremely important voice of the American west in general. Thru the haunted verse of such classic books as The Tattooed Desert, All The Dirty Words, and The Bus To Veracruz, Shelton has painstaking built up a larger narrative that taps into the deep time of his surrounding desert landscape and the wants and needs of the wounded persons who inhabit it, while also at times finding a hard-won beauty and transcendence that can be absolutely breathtaking.