Bathing In The River Of Ashes: Poems [Paperback]

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 craft. Whether considering Somalia, Latin America, the Las Vegas Strip or Nevada's drab mining towns and prisons, he speaks with compassion. Griffin's compelling poems are rich in humor, sympathy, and images of 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 "Women, thinned with pride," who "Walk / the streets that empty to homes . . . laughing, / with children in a wrinkle of quiet feet."

A collection of compelling poems, rich in humor, sympathy, and images of power and beauty

"The second full-length volume by this Nevada-based poet, who edited anthologies of regional literature, is itself part of the publisher's Western Literature Series, and rightly so, since Griffin derives much of his inspiration from the landscape and people who live on the new western prairie where there are few wild things left. Solemn and mournful, Griffin's plain verse bemoans the neon lights of Vegas, the porcine tourists, and laments the closed mines, the decline in agriculture, and the diminishing wilderness." —Kirkus Reviews

"Griffin often presents a Nevada that seems to fade away the closer you get to it, like one of those mid-road mirages at the top of the next hill that just isn't there when you reach it." —Martin Naparsteck, Salt Lake City Tribune, May 16, 1999
 

Shaun Griffin is the co-founder and director of Community Chest, a non-profit agency serving children and families in nortlÓ`