Looking Over My Shoulder: One Day in the Elevator and Welcome to Anhedonia, by W. H. Shirk
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Looking Over My Shoulder: One Day in the Elevator and Welcome to Anhedonia, by W. H. Shirk
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W. H. Shirk has witnessed life at its best and at its worst in his years serving as a pastor and hospital chaplain. In the first of two collections of poems, Shirk shares poignant, honest, and sometimes amusing snapshots that shine a light on a variety of subjects including career ministry, children, gardening, hunting, headaches, and more. In the second collection, he chronicles his personal spiritual journey beginning in a troubled and broken home leading to the churches and hospitals of western Pennsylvania all the while feeling himself increasingly estranged from God. Along the way, he enters Anhedonia-a strange, bland world where joy and satisfaction are unknown.
In richly detailed lyrical verse, Shirk provides an emotional glimpse into his struggle solving the family puzzle in his recall of the past, eventually finding forgiveness, peace, and the strength to move forward into a richer experience of life. Looking Over My Shoulder shares a pastor's insightful poetry as he strives with and finally makes peace with God, learning that in life we can only do the best that we can. Looking Over My Shoulder: One Day in the Elevator and Welcome to Anhedonia, by W. H. Shirk- Amazon Sales Rank: #4354881 in Books
- Published on: 2015-05-21
- Released on: 2015-05-21
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x .30" w x 5.00" l, .30 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 118 pages
About the Author
W. H. Shirk is a retired pastor and institutional chaplain. He earned a bachelor's degree in Speech from Penn State University and a Master of Divinity from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. His poems have been published in several periodicals and an anthology. He lives with his wife, Kathy, in West Miffl in, Pennsylvania.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful. "...deeply moving and satisfying..." By Amazon Customer When Thomas Wolfe, the author of “Look Homeward, Angel”, was attacked by critics for writing purely autobiographical novels, he responded rather testily, “All fiction is autobiographical.” What he meant was that it did not matter that the work produced was rooted in a real life incident experienced by the author himself or a product of the writer’s imagination; it nevertheless is clearly an autobiographical work. Whether it be Oscar Wilde’s “Ballad of Reading Gaol”, based on his prison experiences, or William Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey”, his intimate and personal reaction to the beauty of nature, these are autobiographical works. And this is patently true of William Shirk’s poetry collection “Looking Over My Shoulder”.Open this book to any page and you will find incidents drawn from the author’s life and woven into the fabric of his poetry. To cite but two examples from the scores available: “Chaplain, 0330” and “Sigmund Fraud”. Chaplain, 0330 the chaplain is dead-on-his-feet it’s oh-three-thirty day two nineteen hours in-house on-call he doesn’t remember the patient’s name so he says this your servant when he prays and is the person at bedside her husband or father or son or nephew or brother? so he prays this one who loves her… this chaplain is better in the mornings but not this early so Lord please bless uh, this one who ministers in your name. Sigmund Fraud At the end of the long day at work, there is no satisfaction; there is no joy of accomplishment, no sense of job-well-done. There is only relief and a cleansing sigh, I have pulled it off again: I have been again what I am not, And while some may have suspected it No one knew for sure but me.The reader need not be aware that the writer of these poems is a retired minister to realize that the narrator is the author himself.The task facing this reviewer is not an easy one. Any attempt to analyze all eighty-three poems that make up this collection would fail since the resultant work would rival a Tolstoy novel in length and be read by no one including the author of the poems under discussion. I then thought of writing a comparison/contrast essay on the two halves of the collection but discarded that notion because the result would be heavily weighted on the side of comparison and very little on that of contrast. Finally, I hit upon the idea of examining a subset of the poems that would in microcosm reflect the poetic qualities of the entire work. That subset turned out to be the ten “Only Begotten Son” poems drawn from the “Welcome to Anhedonia” section. Each one of these poems illustrates many of the characteristics that infect most, if not all, of the remaining poems in the collection.Before launching into an analysis of the poems under consideration, I thought it would be helpful to spend a moment or two discussing the prosody, or to be more accurate, the absence of prosody in these poems. The author has chosen to write his poems in vers libre, or free verse, a type of poetry that is constrained neither by rhyme nor meter. The length of its lines is not at all regular and as for rhyme it is almost non-existent. Now the most widely practiced verse form in English, its influence can be felt in the poems of Walt Whitman and the French Symbolists, and because it requires neither a regular meter nor a traditional rhyme scheme, it is ideal for the conversational style and tone adopted by the author.All of the “Only Begotten Son” poems are written in a conversational style, in, as Wordsworth expressed it, the language of ordinary men. All but one (No. IX) evoke the memory of the author’s father: (“His cheek scratchy against mine” – No. I); (“He stayed, sprawled in his pajamas/Behind the funny papers, a cloud/Of camel smoke above his head” – No. III); (“In a reedy disease-trashed voice/Not his own, he said:/You have not been a good son to me.” No. VII). And in all of them the reader is made aware of the sadness, the regret, the envy, and, yes, the anger of the son toward the father. Nowhere is the portrait of this emotionally conflicted son drawn more clearly than in No. V: Once he wrote me a check For a million dollars, a million, In his own checkbook, signed it “The Millionaire,” and with a flourish, Tore it out and handed it to me. I was eight, and thrilled. I still have it. The check. It has become a metaphor: The worthless quality of his attention, The broken promises, the withheld Gestures of affection, the neglect And careless contempt he thought no Child would notice. I still have it.Despite “the worthless quality of his attention, the broken promises, the withheld gestures of affection, the neglect and careless contempt,” despite all that the deep and unchangeable love of this son for his father is made so clear, so movingly clear in the last four words of this poem: “I still have it.” What a gut-wrenching shot!If one of the characteristics of great poetry is its ability to stir the emotions of the reader, then contained within the pages of this slim collection are poems that do just that. I found “Looking Over My Shoulder” deeply moving and satisfying, and I eagerly await the appearance of his next collection.Richard Gurnervnengur@comcast.net
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful. I enjoyed it and would highly recommend it By Catherine Cook Very thought provoking. Some humorous poems, yet some were rather dark. It makes you see the other side of pastors - they are human beings with families and feelings. I enjoyed it and would highly recommend it..
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