Blood & Tears: Poems for Matthew Shepard

by Scott Gibson (Editor)

This wonder and heart felt Blood & Tears by Scott Gibson is a gem. Matthew Shepard, a gentle, petite 21-year old-student at the University of Wyoming was found tied to a fence outside Laramie on a chilly October morning, the victim of a brutal gay bashing. His subsequent death enraged gays everywhere and forced million of other Americans to confront the ugly realities of homophobic hate crimes. This book is for those who wish to have a person remembrance of Matthew Shepard.

Genres: Poetry

147 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1999

Reviews

[Richard Jespers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Many of these seventy plus poems are in direct response to the murder of Matthew Shepard in 1998, and some are poems that seem to reflect the poets’ grief as it reflects off their previous experiences. Both types seem equally profound and make for a good blend of work. Some abstractions work, as in Mark Bibbins’s poem, “. . . as true of martyrs . . .” : “More to the point, death is not an appropriate consequence for an / unwanted flirtation. If it were, how many heterosexual men / might be alive today?” (10). Bravo. Yet, my favorite poems seem to be the ones rooted in the physical world, the concrete nature of Shepard’s life and death and those who mourn him, the ones which capture his slight and delicate nature (5’2” 102 lbs.), like Stephen Potter’s “[X]”: “Slight form, shy weight / caught in / the middle, / how did it happen to / a body so small, // a boy reduced to a / little triangle / inked in with blood / and meaning, bearing / our load of need . . .” (101). No matter which type of poem is registered here, it registers the mass outpouring of love and mourning for a young man wronged, from the many millions to whom it could have happened but didn’t.

[behsforensics]

Cutting is for Broken – A Collection in
Memory of Matthew
Shepard
By Leslea Newman, Rachel Hadas,
Beatrix Gates and Patricia Spears Jones

[Kendall · Rating 2 out of 5]

Though there are a select few poems that are really moving, the majority of this collection is weak. Many of the poems are factually inaccurate. It is not a use of artistic license, but rather a lack of in-depth investigation.