Bathing In The River Of Ashes: Poems (Western Literature Series)

Shaun Griffin is a poet of impassioned engagement-in the common joys and suffering of the human experience, in the natural world, in the complexity of language and the poet's exacting craft. His vision embraces the vast possibilities of mankind's perseverance, from Somalia to Latin America, from Nevada's drab mining towns and prisons to the glittering Las Vegas Strip, and his voice is one of unflinching honesty and compassion. Yet Griffin's compelling poems are also rich in humor, sympathy, and images of unforgettable power and beauty-desert magpies circling a dead comrade, "with the last dry speech of family"; a newly released prisoner returning to freedom, who "breathed sky and bore no sadness." And in the title poem, an evocation of the turbulent life of the great Ganges River, he leaves us with an image of the pride and beauty of the poor, of "Women, thinned with pride," who "Walk / the streets that empty to homes . . . laughing, / with children in a wrinkle of quiet feet."