Song and Dance: Poems - Hardcover

Shapiro, Alan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0618152857 ISBN 13: 9780618152858

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002

Synopsis

Alan Shapiro's seventh collection celebrates art as a woefully inadequate yet necessary source of comfort. "Amazingly sensitive and tough-minded" (Tom Sleigh), the poems in Song and Dance intimately describe the complicated feelings that attend the catastrophic loss of a loved one. In 1998, Shapiro's brother, David, an actor on Broadway, was diagnosed with an incurable form of brain cancer. Song and Dance recounts the poet's emotional journey through the last months of his brother's life, exploring feelings too often ignored in official accounts of grief: horror, relief, impatience, exhaustion, exhilaration, fear, self-criticism, fulfillment.

About this title

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.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Everything the Traffic Will Allow The two boys don't suspect

they don't exist. And Ethel Merman is

the shade of a shade -- what Plato says

all poetry is --

a record spinning beneath

a needle

as the boys lip-sync into

imaginary mikes her glottal swagger,

brassy, large,

streetwise and from their mouths

so touchingly naive for being so . . .

There's no

people

like show

people . . . Their parents clap

and whistle

from the bed, propped up

on pillows . . .

Everything about it is appealing . . .

They are shouting Encore! Bravo!

when the boys,

like chorus girls, arms on each other's shoulders,

step-kick their way across the room

and out of it,

then back . . . stealing that extra bow . . .

Shades of a shade. What poetry is.

Because there's nowhere else for them to be

except

inside the room in which it isn't

when it is,

in which there is no room

unless I think of it -- the boys

their arms flung wide

on one knee mouthing the last words

before the needle slides off into silence,

the parents propped up

on pillows, half laughing, half

shouting Bravo!

Encore!

All now just the shade

of a shade --

like no

people

I know . . .

About this edition

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0618152857
• ISBN 13: 9780618152858
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 59