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.

Reviews

Brief, tightly wrought and compelling, this eighth book of poems from Shapiro (The Last Happy Occasion) remembers his charismatic brother David, a Broadway actor who died recently from brain cancer. Shapiro's terse, moving sequence begins with poems about the two brothers as children, then moves swiftly into David's diagnosis, his last months of bodily decay and his family's uncomprehending grief. The poet's tools in portraying it all range from slow unrhymed couplets to prose poems and three-step, all-over-the-page lines, and from defiant show-business exuberance to a grave abstraction. One early, eloquent sentence considers "the still// inexorable autonomous/ machinery of obligations// that displace us even as/ they make us who we are"; the brothers' mix of admiration and struggle show "force/ requiring counterforce/ to feel how strong/ it is." Later poems set (in whole or in part) in the hospital set David's physical collapse against the bravery of his "beloved singers, tricksters/ of solace," "the dying brother/ playing the dying brother." Allusions range from Dickinson (in a poem called "Fly") to nursery rhymes; precedents include Marie Howe, Mark Doty, Donald Hall and Paul Monette, all of whom have published widely admired sequences about tending the dying though Shapiro's terse self-control in some ways excels them all. Shapiro (who won a Los Angeles Times Book Award for Mixed Company) has in the past seemed predictable, or perfunctory, as he took on the emotions of middle-class life; here, however, an awful subject has produced a volume to remember. (Mar.) Forecast: Shapiro edits the Phoenix poetry series at the University of Chicago Press, and is well known to the poetry community. This book should put him in a wholly new category among his peers, and will be a contender for major awards. It will also be a comfort to readers in his speaker's situation.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Ranging through memories old and recent, factual and imagined, Shapiro celebrates his brother, David, a song-and-dance man diagnosed with inoperable brain cancer just three years after their sister's death from breast cancer. The opening poem, in W. C. Williams' stair-step-like variable foot, portrays the brothers as children, lip-synching and step-kicking to an Ethel Merman record for their parents; and the last, in prose, collects some of David's last, jesting responses to his illness, which are genuinely funny. Glimpses of him in agony confirm that he was a real trouper, most indelibly, perhaps, in the depiction of his last day, when his restlessness--"as if in search / of some way / out of the dying / body that just / would not die"--mirrors that of a fly in the room, trying to escape through a windowpane. This book of poems in which not a word seems mischosen is one of the finest examples of the new secular poetry of illness and death that would assuage grief when the consolations of religion ring hollow. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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 . . .

Edition details

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