Shore, whose previous book, Music Minus One, was a finalist for the National Book Award, here reflects on incidents and domestic tableaux concerning the desperate, comical, elusive, simple, or complicated kinds of happiness indigenous to her 1950s New Jersey neighborhood. At once universal and personal, Shore's poems are uncanny autobiographical duets for past and present, childhood and adulthood, daughter and mother. Like an album of black-and-white photos come to life, Happy Family offers an honest poetry that dignifies memory through detail.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Shore continues her exploration of her Jewish heritage, her parents, her difficult middle-class childhood and her later life history in this fourth collection of poems. The adult Shore recalls the young Jane asking a rabbi about Jesus in "The Second Coming"; recalls her aunt Flossie's once-captivating book of dirty jokes in "Over Sexteen"; considers her daughter's dolls in "'American Girls'"; and contrasts her younger and older selves in a complex two-part poem called "Next Day," an answer to Randall Jarrell's poem of that name. As in Shore's previous work, arguments, transitions, phrasings and line breaks frequently seem modeled very closely and accurately on Robert Lowell's Life Studies: Shore, still, wants to adopt for her own autobiographical verse the strained, irregular, anti-heroic forms Lowell invented for his own. The results can be moving or witty; the title poem's Chinese-restaurant dish, a "marriage of meat and fish, crab and chicken," inspires the quip, "Not all Happy Families are alike." Often, though, Shore sounds self-important, or flat: "Even as [Shore's mother] was dying,/ she shut me out, preferring to be alone." After a Catholic babysitter's cigarette ashes blew into the young Shore's eyes, Shore tells us that she cried "tears like burning rain.... Since then, I often confuse revelation and pain." Shore comes across as believable when describing in verse her experiences of growing up, having a child, and growing older; once such self-knowledge and frankness (especially in sexual matters) inspired readers (and accomplished novel political work). But Shore's own generation of poets has made the life passages she describes a regular and plentifully covered field of American poetry; her honesty no longer seems enough.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
Shore (Music Minus One), winner of the Lamont and Juniper poetry prizes for earlier books, presents poems of family life, including several describing her own childhood as a dressmaker's daughter. Shore's strengths are fine storytelling and an eye for detail, as in "The Best-Dressed Girl in School": "I'd climb on a stool/ so I could better see/ my mother tease a woman's arm/ into a silk sleeve of a blouse." Although many of these poems celebrate the domestic, Shore does not flinch from painful topics. "Mrs. Hitler" describes a girl who creates a game of Auschwitz survival from cheese, crackers, a plate, and the whispered innuendo of relatives. Shore's poems have a directness and emotional intensity that will draw the reader, but at times they are too rooted in everyday languageAone longs for more lyricism. She uses metaphor too sparingly, even though she is gifted at it, as in the title poem: "I unpacked the food,/ unsheathed the wooden chopsticksA/ Siamese twins joined at the shoulders." Recommended for both public and academic libraries.ADoris Lynch, Monroe Cty. P.L., Bloomington, IN
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Shore's Honesty And Gift For Remembering Her Own Past Are What Make Her Great.,
By Notnadia (Currently upstairs.) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Happy Family: Poems (Paperback)
Jane Shore is a talented author, poet, writer of memoirs, but I think it's her ability to look clearly back into her own past that makes her books so engrossing. I like her work and I think hers is an overlooked voice among modern American writers.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Wonderful Poet of Life,
By
This review is from: Happy Family: Poems (Paperback)
I had the good fortune to see and hear Jane Shore read in Maryland. Her work pops with a warm strength for capturing the beauty of life. After the reading I picked up a copy of Happy Family and have been delighted by return visits to its pages. Shore is a masterful recorder of the delights of the everyday and the importance of the familial recognition of memory.
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