New and Selected Poems (1965–2006)

In the mid-'60s Shapiro met, collaborated with and imitated—with impressive facility—the first generation of the so-called New York School, especially Ashbery. Four decades later, his smart, many-sided oeuvre includes books on art history and theory, and the nine volumes of spiky, demanding verse from which this volume selects. "Can I see you today for the whole day? How long will that be?/ Here is a present for you. A silver brain?" says one of Shapiro's many poems that explore the outer edges of sense. Shapiro's poems often retain his mentor's puzzling strangeness and charm, though without Ashbery's supple syntax; they also have a penchant for collage, Romantic lament combined with seeming nonsense, self-consciously postmodern self-description ("secret waves are breaking: abundance, enigmagram"), and varied length and form. Connoisseurs of difficulty have long found much to love in Shapiro's work. Yet as the collection swivels and swerves toward the present (and 10 new poems), Shapiro shows more of his learning in modern art, music and Judaica, as well as more of his emotional life, as in a quiet 2002 elegy: "It is not our custom to pray in the direction of the Tower of Babel/ And it's all ordinary, the stars, the stuff of love." (Mar.)