James Shea’s collection deepens his exploration of the elegiac imagination, sending estranged speakers into new fields of quiet crisis. Orbiting a vast absence, Last Day of My Face reveals a kaleidoscopic perspective on impermanence: “Tomorrow / is a partial and promised gift.”
Rich with reversals, short poems are wedged against skittery contemplations, and an easeful tone coexists with a vein of darkness. Akin to lucid dreaming, this startling volume builds toward a final poem that gathers fragments of selves into a wondrous whole.
“Shea stretches the possibilities of experience/interpretation to include not only the phantasmic and catastrophic, but the most mundane. How else to counter the nihilism inherent in the excruciating human project of dreaming, believing, needing illusion? The poet finds starlight in the wreckage, witnesses it behind layers of glass—some shattered, some magnifying—and makes a humble assemblage of letters to face death with. This book is mysteriously pure. It knows that the puzzling moment needs no solution—the moment, the only one anyone has, can be the last day, or it can be a ‘whole’ life. This book lets one consciousness at a time talk ecstatically to time; it lets time talk dispassionately back. I’m astounded at the conversation I am in on, and more than a little afraid—irradiated.”—Brenda Shaughnessy, judge, Iowa Poetry Prize
“Listening to James Shea’s voice in these poems, one leans in closer, sensing that there is something crucial to learn. He tracks the vagaries of the inner life with a calm, almost bone-dry language, yet there is a wounding richness to it. ‘They have no extremity of dress / left to express the real grief,’ a speaker remarks of women in perpetual mourning. Shea’s quiet wit and considered thinking constitute a lyric boundary limit as a form of spiritual survival.”
—Sandra Lim, author, The Curious Thing
“James Shea’s open and unpretentious Last Day of My Face begins as an
indulgence in ‘the luxury of not understanding,’ informed by an awareness of ‘Something inherently elegiac about reversals.’ But this acquiescence in the
fleetingness of black-and-white movie walk-ons, who ‘in the brevity of their
appearance’ and with ‘a vitality at doing nothing in particular’ are ‘vigorously alive and gone,’ ultimately culminates in the triumph of the sustained exercise in self-creation, ‘Failed Self-Portrait,’ with which this marvelous volume ends.”
—John Koethe, author, Beyond Belief
“Observing their surroundings from a reserved, solitary place, the poems in Last Day of My Face watch with such an intense stillness that the living field forgets anyone is looking. A sweet, melancholy music of detachment runs through this work, where people, sensations, moods are tamped down, contained: the self sealed off behind glass from itself. This deep witnessing, which is also a kind of deep listening, yields no answers. Yet through the cement of sober self-assessment a sly humor stubbornly sprouts. And despite their best efforts to restrain subterranean impulses, the poems ‘outgrow themselves, / break off into a fifth season.’ These lyrics deny nothing in a stiff embrace of the possible, quietly joyful in their cool unknowing.”—Shane Book, author, All Black Everything (Iowa, 2023)
