Where a road had been

Poetry. "In WHERE A ROAD HAD BEEN Matt Shears enters American poetry already far to the fore, just perceptible at the limit of a strenuous, refined thinking about the dirt and destructions of new beginnings. At once super-sophisticated and an American original, Shears comes out of Gertrude Stein via the great late-20th century French thought about the constant coverings-up of language ('they were always covering up. / what they were saying, and so baroque'), and about the torsions and wipings-away, the fear and the featherings, in any attempt to arrive at (to be) the new, there 'where dis-covery [is] becoming. / in a fledgling sky, with a destructible wing.' Once or twice he tantalizes the reader with the possibility that the new might actually be, despite history, a pure 'yes / hosanna / hello'; but in the main, he's a tough-minded realist. His caesuras ('they could not see, what was coming') tug backward what goes forward; his obsessive, musical repetitions and permutations of phrase do the same, at once hollowing out what he says and struggling to say more. The final line of this brilliantly intelligent collection sums it all up: 'a heart opening /closing / breaking'"—Cal Bedient.