Night of the Republic [Hardcover]

Alan Shapiro (Author)

Book Description

Release date: January 17, 2012

An urgent and timely collection by one of America’s most inventive and accessible poets

In Night of the Republic, Alan Shapiro takes us on an unsettling night tour of America’s public places—a gas station restroom, shoe store, convention hall, and race track among others—and in stark Edward Hopper–like imagery reveals the surreal and dreamlike features of these familiar but empty night spaces. Shapiro finds in them not the expected alienation but rather an odd, companionable solitude rising up from the quiet emptiness.

In other poems, Shapiro writes movingly of his 1950s and 60s childhood in Brookline, Massachusetts, with special focus on the house he grew up in. These meditations, always inflected with Shapiro’s quick wit and humor, lead to recollections of tragic and haunting events such as the Cuban missile crisis and the assassination of JFK. While Night of the Republic is Shapiro’s most ambitious work to date, it is also his most timely and urgent for the acute way it illuminates the mingling of private obsessions with public space.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

In his twelfth collection of poetry, Shapiro, who holds an endowed chair at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, is concerned with phenomena and places. He finds the most generic location and douses for its most evocative associations. A gas station restroom at night, for example, has a stink and anonymity that seem to evoke the general unease of road tripping. An empty strip club during the day holds the presence of its lonely strippers and their lonelier clientele, inching their chairs too close to the stage and the women’s nudity. “Stone Church,” “Hospital Examination Room,” “Indoor Municipal Pool”—all receive this schematic treatment. Old buildings are “embarrassed” by their modernist neighbors, “by how nakedly / outside / outside is here.” Here the line breaks add emphasis to a resonant idea, the sense amplified by the sounds. In the last third of the book, Shapiro uses a similar approach, formally and aesthetically, to visions from his childhood. Readers might take comfort in Shapiro’s visions. The poet is also debuting as a novelist this month with Broadway Baby (2012). --Michael Autrey

About the Author

Alan Shapiro is the William R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is the author of nine acclaimed books of poetry. He is a former recipient of the Kingsley Tufts Award and the Los Angeles Book Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He was recently elected as a fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 80 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; First Edition edition (January 17, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0547329709
• ISBN-13: 978-0547329703
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #323,114 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Good poems here December 5, 2011

By J from NY VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

Alan Shapiro's "Night of the Republic" digs gently into a theme that I imagine every poet has at least thought deeply about once or twice--the way in which the nighttime speaks to us,all those abandoned cars, parking lots, parks just sort of sitting under artifical neon glow.

Speechlessly interviewing the landscape around him he encounters fatigued cashiers, empty museums, restrooms, and tries to convey the odd ambiance to the reader. With a touch (perhaps too much) of gentility he does so successfully and realizes the poetic concept.

My only problem with the collection is that he doesn't dig into the seedier side of the American Night and boy is that hard to miss if one is out there. Then again I'm not totally sure where he was when writing this. Though some other reviewers here found this disappointing, I think we need more poetry that gets the knife and fork out and digs into the dark without being self indulgent. And this what Alan Shapiro accomplishes. Heavily recommended.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Simply said November 30, 2011

By SAM VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

Mr. Shapiro takes some of what we would call the "mundane" places at night to a whole new level. This was thought-provoking and yet easy to read (I read it all in 2 nights). I felt as if I was with the author as he goes from the gas station restroom to the car dealership to the supermarket, etc. Much of his descriptions are simply and eloquently done; however, others such as Forgiveness, Beloved, and the Family are touching.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars wicked and bristling with dots November 30, 2011

By Case Quarter VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

these poems at first glance appear as paintings of the photorealism school. shapiro paints objects in bright colors back dropped with black night, the light coming from street lights as well as neon and the moon, often reflecting on water. in Park Bench light is a veritable meteor show:

Left of the bench there is a bridge
that spans the river
and beyond the bridge around a bend
floodlights ...

are dumping fire all night long
into the river; but here
where the bench is,
the river is black, the river
is lava long past its cooling,
black as night
with only a few lights ...

glittering on the water
like tiny crystals in a black geode.

his objects are imbued with living attributes and moods, a kind of illuminated transcendentalism. you catch on early to what alan shapiro is up to, and from then on in it becomes a game of locating which object the shimmering nimbus is radiating from.

in the second of the four sections, he expands his metaphor of light and dark to the cosmos and black holes. Galaxy Formation is the name of the second section and the title of the longest word packed - the densest - poem in the book.

by the time shapiro arrives home at the final section, space has become internalized within himself. in The Shed he describes what a science book told him:

... I was made

Of cells, and the cells were made of molecules
Made of atoms made of mostly space,
And how within them what wasn't space within them

there were other spaces, smaller and vaster spaces ...

the final section At the Corner of Coolidge and Clarence, a collection of twenty tercets, each twenty-one lines and seven stanzas, each poem continuing the naming of titles after objects. the poems situated in the narrator's past are structured in triads, the boy, the object as transitive of feelings, and persons, living or dead, beyond the object who have charged the object with energy; the result: each construction is a psychological moment.

sadly, for shapiro, negotiation with objects is the best he can hope for, his message of light and color and objects in the burning night and sometimes in the cold day are the objects outside plato's cave, inside the images still remain on the wall, of first art, of first philosophy. but for all our civilization of buildings, objects, and rituals, mr shapiro does not see us as being very civil to one another within our republic. all of this is conveyed brilliantly by him.