Bathing in the River of Ashes

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."