This isn't a book to read aloud in polite company. But what a refreshment that is, given the overpowering strain of gentility and restraint in American poetry. Useful as decorum may be as a poetic virtue in Moore and Bishop, interesting as some poems are by Frost and Stevens that conceal rather than reveal, such tendencies have become moribund in lesser writers. There has been a justly strong reaction against the confessional, suicidal poetry of the Sixties. But Berg's work, while deeply autobiographical, is not confessional. It is meditative, "metaphysical": it presents profound psychic knots and tries to untie them or at least show us their shape. There is an amazing variety in this work, of tone, of movement, of narrative, of anecdote, of subject. Shaving is more presentational and objective (a la Chekhov) than anything by Lowell, Plath or Sexton. The self is certainly a similar amphitheater for Berg, but it isn't inexorably at center-stage; its sympathies and boundaries are wider. And it is this expansiveness (precisely what is lacking in confessional poetry) that is so exhilarating. Something absolutely new is being done in this book.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Often a form for those seeking a diversion from the domineering lyric, the prose poem is here vigorously taken up by veteran poet and American Poetry Review editor Berg. Turning away from his recent Versions (improvised translations of other poems), and toward the autobiographical, Berg crafts self-investigations that are operatic in scope. In unparagraphed blocks of text that often run for pages, the poet obsesses about his relationships: to friends and former friends, his wife, his parents (troubled) and to the American poetic tradition. At one point, he muses over a voyeuristic encounter at his parents' bedroom door; in another, the poet traces his ambivalent feelings for a friend who has died of leukemia. In "Lowell: Self-Portrait," he recalls a visit to his then teacher at MacLean hospital where the famous poet is recovering from a breakdown: "it's like seeing myself in another, as another who watches me, a blanked-out unknown self sick with identity... I am not sure who I am or if I'm here, there's nothing inside/outside I can grab to anchor me." (Freud, Auden, Cassavetes and Conrad make less intimate appearances elsewhere.) As their subject matter suggests, these are poems written by a poet in mid-life, mid-career attempting to survey his position in the world by triangulating it through others. At times, their length, detail and self-absorption are trying. Yet these arias of self-witness, 10 of which were published in New & Selected Poems (1992), are spirited departures for Berg; they deserve our attention and, often, our applause.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
". . .Stephen Berg's Shaving is the first book of prose poems I have read that has made me re-examine the function and power of that branch of our poetry. It is a book of strenuous and often dangerous self-witness; an astounding overview of American urban life at the apex and turning point of a major civilization. . .most importantly, it is brilliantly written. . .In reading Berg you will be reading the master of the prose poem." (Jorie Graham )
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4 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Poetic prose; forget line breaks; rhythm, friend!,
By A Customer
This review is from: Shaving (Paperback)
It sounds trite, but pioneer is the only word that comes to mind. Steve is out there practicing what I believe to be a long ignored art. In his writng, Steve finds the perfect rhythm that eliminates the need for line breaks, his pauses are reminiscent of Kerouac's dashes where he stopped blowing to inhale for another verse of "bop prose".Berg blowing beyond all limits and breaking all the norms! Beautiful, or at least thats the opinion of this Zen Berg hopeful-
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