Phoenix Poets
8 total works
We often ask ourselves what gets lost in translation--not just between languages, but in the everyday trade-offs between what we experience and what we are able to say about it. But the visionary poems of this collection invite us to consider: what is loss, in translation? Writing at the limits of language--where "the signs loosen, fray, and drift"--Alan Shapiro probes the startling complexity of how we confront absence and the ephemeral, the heartbreak of what once wasn't yet and now is no longer, of what (like racial prejudice and historical atrocity) is omnipresent and elusive. Through poems that are fine-grained and often quiet, Shapiro tells of subtle bereavements: a young boy is shamed for the first time for looking "girly"; an ailing old man struggles to visit his wife in a nursing home; or a woman dying of cancer watches her friends enjoy themselves in her absence. Throughout, this collection traverses rather than condemns the imperfect language of loss--moving against the current in the direction of the utterly ineffable.
In his sixth book of poems, Alan Shapiro once again shows that he is a master at articulating the secrets of the heart. "The Dead Alive and Busy" deals with issues of personal identity as revealed through examining the intimate bonds of family life. The poems explore these familial relations in terms of the religious, social and literary contexts that inform them, delving into such universal themes as human frailty, illness and death, bereavement and thwarted desires. By turns lyrical and narrative, slangy and elevated, analytical and visionary, this collection showcases one of America's most important poets in his top form.
"The coherence Shapiro prizes is both more thorough and more thoroughgoing than that offered by a moralizing intelligence. His poetry comes by its sad wisdom through its accomodations to human happenstance and estrangement. . . .In Covenant, sympathy grounds itself in worldly particulars, and subjectivity begets responsibilities. Hardnosed yet tenderly attentive, Shapiro's acute self-consciousness distills an exacting conscientiousness."—David Barber, Poetry
"At forty-years-old and already the author of four superbly written books of poems, Shapiro has produced a work of such authority and originality that he has permanently enlarged my hopes and expectations for contemporary poetry. His risk-loving swiftness of perception and his affinity for stories that up-end convention and taboo have enabled him to reclaim, for poets of my generation, areas of feeling and linguistic virtuosity that originated with William Carlos Williams, Elizabeth Bishop, J. V. Cunningham, and Ivor Winters. It is hard for me to see how an ideal anthologist of the future will be able to include their names without gratefully including his."—Tom Sleigh, Boston Phoenix
"At forty-years-old and already the author of four superbly written books of poems, Shapiro has produced a work of such authority and originality that he has permanently enlarged my hopes and expectations for contemporary poetry. His risk-loving swiftness of perception and his affinity for stories that up-end convention and taboo have enabled him to reclaim, for poets of my generation, areas of feeling and linguistic virtuosity that originated with William Carlos Williams, Elizabeth Bishop, J. V. Cunningham, and Ivor Winters. It is hard for me to see how an ideal anthologist of the future will be able to include their names without gratefully including his."—Tom Sleigh, Boston Phoenix
Respected poet, teacher, and critic Alan Shapiro continues his much-acclaimed explorations of childhood, family, and marriage in Mixed Company. Revealing a world troubled by difference while struggling toward commonality, and with equal attention to historical detail and the poetics of everyday life, from the mythic past to the abrasive intimacies of the present, Shapiro charts the many ways our social and sexual identities are formed, threatened, altered, and, for good or ill, preserved. Deeply felt and ambitious, Mixed Company is an extraordinary book by one of the leading poets writing in America today.
"What draws us into Alan Shapiro's Mixed Company is not a conspicuous felicity or any sort of bravura, but the quiet, undaunted way he goes after the truth of human feeling and motive. . . . The poems grope and conjecture, looking for understanding . . . but whatever may remain unsolved and insoluble, the poems are full of astonishing insights, a rare articulateness, and what another age called 'knowledge of the human heart.'" —Richard Wilbur
"What draws us into Alan Shapiro's Mixed Company is not a conspicuous felicity or any sort of bravura, but the quiet, undaunted way he goes after the truth of human feeling and motive. . . . The poems grope and conjecture, looking for understanding . . . but whatever may remain unsolved and insoluble, the poems are full of astonishing insights, a rare articulateness, and what another age called 'knowledge of the human heart.'" —Richard Wilbur
"Within his deliberately narrowed range Mr. Shapiro has cultivated a new generosity of detail and insight. This is especially important in the longer poems here, narratives of considerable power. They may seem more like versified short stories than poems, but their skill and force are moving."—J. D. McClatchy, New York Times Book Review
"Happy Hour is one of the best collections I have recently read. Mr. Shapiro writes with apparently equal ease in free verse and more nearly traditional forms, and he brings his formidable technical skills to bear upon matters of great urgency: our need to love and be loved, and the often perverse ways in which we maintain our connections to those closest to us."—Henry Taylor, Washington Times
"This is a haunting, mature collection that should attract a larger audience for Shapiro's fine poems."—Thomas Swiss, Chicago Tribune
"Happy Hour is one of the best collections I have recently read. Mr. Shapiro writes with apparently equal ease in free verse and more nearly traditional forms, and he brings his formidable technical skills to bear upon matters of great urgency: our need to love and be loved, and the often perverse ways in which we maintain our connections to those closest to us."—Henry Taylor, Washington Times
"This is a haunting, mature collection that should attract a larger audience for Shapiro's fine poems."—Thomas Swiss, Chicago Tribune
From Let Me Hear You Outside is inside now. The pyramid whose point we are is weightless and invisible and has become itself the night in which alone together on a high plateau we go on shouting out whatever name those winds keep blowing back into the mouth that's shouting it. Alan Shapiro's newest book of poetry is situated at the intersection between private and public history, as well as individual life and the collective life of middle-class America in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Whether writing about an aged and dying parent or remembering incidents from childhood and adolescence, Shapiro attends to the world in ways that are as deeply personal as they are recognizable and freshly social both timeless and utterly of this particular moment.
In this, his first book, Alan Shapiro vividly recreates some of the more memorable and poignant moments from his Jewish-American childhood, and in the process reveals his compassionate interest in the forgotten, the alienated, and the infirm. The Courtesy is an intelligent, reflective examination of the poet's own psychological history. "The Courtesy is really an admirable book: it shows up the unreality of a lot of the other poetry one reads, dealing honestly and with that perversity which is a sign of thoughfulness, with the slight but heavy matter of our everyday defeats."--Michael Hoffman, Poetry Nation Review
Award-winning poet Alan Shapiro offers a new collection of poems reflecting on mortality and finitude.
Alan Shapiro's fourteenth collection of poetry, Proceed to Check Out, is a kind of summing up, or stock-taking, by an aging poet, of his precarious place in a world dominated by the ever-accelerating pace of technological innovation, political disruption, personal loss, and racial strife. These poems take on fundamental subjects-like the nature of time and consciousness and how or why we become who we are-but Shapiro presses them into becoming urgent and timely.
Employing idiomatic range and formal variety, Shapiro's poems move through recurring dreams, the coercions of childhood, and the mysterious connections of mind and matter, pleasure and memory. They meet an abiding need to find empathy and understanding in even the most challenging places-amid disaffection, public discord, and estrangement. His grasp of contemporary life-in all its insidious violence and beauty-is distinct, comprehensive, and profound.
Alan Shapiro's fourteenth collection of poetry, Proceed to Check Out, is a kind of summing up, or stock-taking, by an aging poet, of his precarious place in a world dominated by the ever-accelerating pace of technological innovation, political disruption, personal loss, and racial strife. These poems take on fundamental subjects-like the nature of time and consciousness and how or why we become who we are-but Shapiro presses them into becoming urgent and timely.
Employing idiomatic range and formal variety, Shapiro's poems move through recurring dreams, the coercions of childhood, and the mysterious connections of mind and matter, pleasure and memory. They meet an abiding need to find empathy and understanding in even the most challenging places-amid disaffection, public discord, and estrangement. His grasp of contemporary life-in all its insidious violence and beauty-is distinct, comprehensive, and profound.