Harvey Shapiro's precise, understated lyrics have garnered praise in the US, the UK, and in Israel. His early poems, hailed by The Nation as "some of the best poems of our generation," were notable in part because they gave new form to Jewish immigrant experience. This collection presents the best work from Shapiro's early books, including the classic poems "Battle Report" on World War II and "National Cold Storage Company" on the death of John Kennedy, and a wealth of new poems, more sensual, but no less wry. Shapiro sees life itself as a state of exile, and writes of the spaces where "for a moment, the light holds."
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Library Journal
For many years, Shapiro has graced the American poetry scene with his urban, immigrant-Jewish, philosophic objectivism, which in a series of changes throughout his writing career has shown us again and again the richness that accrues from his persistent awareness of his "foreignness in this world." Unlike so many poets today, who have become "priestly" denizens of academia, Shapiro writes in an idiom that coexists with the daily life around him, which generally means the environs of Brooklyn, Queens, and Manhattan in New York. Having experienced what he calls the "clarifying chill" of war as a gunner in a bomber during World War II, he has worked as an editor for the New York Times Magazine and has participated in the founding of the Yale Poetry Review and Epoch. This volume treats us to the full range of Shapiro's work, from his earliest formal "British-tinged" efforts to the more colloquial, confessional poems of his later years. A most satisfying volume, ably introduced by James Atlas, this deserves to be a part of most poetry collections.?Thomas F. Merrill, Univ. of Delaware, Newark
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
"Shapiro writes in sardonic reverence . . . His poetry is a 'practical use / Of mysterious names.' It is modest, usually simple, but precise, courageous, and unflinching in its sadness." --Hayden Carruth, The Nation
"Working within the conventions of alienation and isolation, [Shapiro] develops a quietly distinctive and forceful idiom . . . Pre-figured in the earlier poems on Jewish and Old Testament themes, and developed in increasingly flexible forms, he makes good his ironic claim of 'praise [of] an age that has no monuments.' Because his irony works dramatically, the brief soliloquies he presents in deliberately low-keyed terms are often surprisingly moving." --Samuel French Morse, New York Times Book Review
"Working within the conventions of alienation and isolation, [Shapiro] develops a quietly distinctive and forceful idiom . . . Pre-figured in the earlier poems on Jewish and Old Testament themes, and developed in increasingly flexible forms, he makes good his ironic claim of 'praise [of] an age that has no monuments.' Because his irony works dramatically, the brief soliloquies he presents in deliberately low-keyed terms are often surprisingly moving." --Samuel French Morse, New York Times Book Review
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