Perhaps it was no accident that I finally had a chance to read Tyler Robert Sheldon’s latest poetry collection, Everything Is Ghosts (Finishing Line Press 2024), at Christmastime. Just like the Christmas Eve of Ebeneezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’ immortal Christmas tale, this book is populated by ghosts of past, present, and future. The poems here focus on the reflections of a motley assortment of new friends brought together by chance as they navigate the transition from youth to adulthood during the formative years of college. The literal setting for those poems is Sheldon’s undergraduate alma mater, Emporia State University in his native Kansas, and its environs. But the real locus is the author’s memory of time and place and his contemplations about what the past bodes for their future.
For his title, Sheldon borrows a line from “Creative Writing,” the most expansive and perhaps best of the thirty narrowly focused and tightly crafted poems in this collection:
Everything
is ghosts, and everything is also music.
Everything is also stars, what gets left
behind when pure bright energy throws
itself, almost expired, out into the void.
On one level, the book is a poetic memoir and each poem a vividly recalled vignette from an important, and impressionable, time in the poet’s past. There are first and favorite classes, late-night card games and even later food runs to quell the munchies, expeditions to the haunted Rocky Ford Bridge just outside of town, hanging out at bars and pizza joints, and staking out one’s own territory and identity in a first apartment off campus.
But the omnipresence of the spectral suggests—no, begs—us to consider, that the work is something more than fond remembrance.
While the poems emanate from a singular perspective, the cast of characters is broad and includes a number with recurring roles. Among them are JG, an alum of a prior institution (psychiatric rather than academic) who “smiles like a man covering bad news;” the seductive Courtney, “full of a secret we’d only learn in time;” Rachel, one state away from an abusive husband; and Sammi, the Art major who lives off campus in a Midwestern two-story.
And, yes, there are ghosts. Lots of ghosts. Sheldon’s title does not promise more than the poems themselves deliver. Each one is inhabited by apparitions, real and rumored, and by people haunted by the past and by ruminations about the future.
The key notes are struck in the opening poem, “Legacy,” about the poet’s first days at the college where his grandfather taught forty years before and where his parents met. It ends with the anxious lines:
The road opens before me
and yawns like the mouth
of a bright, waiting ghost.
Among the haunts who visit the living are the basketball player who “had died while dribbling” in the dorm down the hall; a woman who died in the library stacks and manifests herself by “jumping / out at anyone who takes a book from the / fourth floor;” Sandy Bird, the preacher’s wife killed by her husband so he could marry another woman; and Mary Katherine White, the daughter of Kansas newspaperman and Progressive movement leader William Allen White (himself a graduate of the school then known as Emporia College) and who died in a 1921 horse-riding accident. In addition, Sammi the Art major swears “the upstairs houses at least a few ghosts.”
More vexing, though, are the personal hauntings. Rachel’s eyes are “haunted, dark green vessels full of ghosts.” And the eyes of Terry, the painter bound to a wheelchair by polio, are “torches lighting the ghosts of his past.” Courtney is likewise haunted, in her case by memories of a semi running a red light, and she remembers “the time before, when math and other studies were easy.”
And, again like one of Scrooge’s late-night tour guides, there are specters of the future. In “The Truth Is We Were All Afraid of Death,” Sheldon reflects, “Whoever left first, they kept bringing up the ghost everyone talked of, living (dying? whatever).” And in “Jazz Chords, Like Friendly Ghosts,” he is visited by a vision of what the future holds for a favorite extra-curricular hangout:
In a few years this will be a print shop,
and everyone will wear their shirts.
Later I’ll leave town and this night will
float along behind me like a ghost,
and when I come back the building
will stand empty, waiting for
someone to give it its next name.
A wise person once said that the old fear the certainty of their past, while the young fear the uncertainty of their future, and they both fret over the changes in between. Change is another wraith that frequents these poems and the people who feature in them, especially the unsettling changes brought about by new experiences, new freedoms, and a shifting sense of one’s place in the world. Sheldon captures that angst most effectively in “Despite”:
Do we refuse, all of us / to meet each others’ eyes / at breakfast because we know / something has shifted, or / because what has shifted / is ourselves—and are we / maybe even comfortable.
The same theme is expressed visually in the book’s cover, a photo of the bridge over Rocky Ford, the very one guarded by the ghost of Sandy Bird. It serves as a photographic metaphor of the crossing over, however tentatively or reluctantly, from one stage in life to the next.
As mentioned earlier, this book is more than a memoir or a collection of superstitions and ghost stories. Like Courtney’s secret that is only learned in time, the truth that gives Sheldon’s collection deeper meaning and broader relevance comes to us only gradually as we read the poems. But come it does, and it is this. Like characters in most horror movies, we are entranced most not by what delights, but by what terrifies us most. And for most of us, that is not ghosts in the attic or the college library but the fear of facing past traumas and regrets, change, emerging identities, and uncertainty about the future. The reminders are everywhere in this new collection, and no amount of ghost busting can remedy that fact. As the title of Sheldon’s closing poem suggests, “They’re All Still Here.”
Robert Tyler Sheldon
A native of Kansas, Tyler Robert Sheldon earned an MFA in Creative Writing from McNeese State University and completed the PhD in English at Louisiana State University in 2024. In addition to teaching duties at LSU, he is editor-in-chief of MockingHeart Review, an online literary and art journal based in Baton Rouge. Everything Is Ghosts is his seventh book of poetry. Tyler’s work has also appeared in SLANT, Dialogue, The Los Angeles Review, Ninth Letter, Pleiades, Quiddity, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and other places.
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