The Last Happy Occasion

Many recent autobiographies trade on the author's celebrity, miserable childhood or personal problems. Shapiro, a middle-aged English professor and prize-winning poet (Happy Hours) has none of that baggage to carry and exploit. Yet his book has a lot more to offer the reader than do many racier or more lurid memoirs. Shapiro uses poetry and its ""transformative power"" as the basis for his fascinating perceptions about a relatively ordinary life. He is an acute observer of moments, people, art and language. And he packs even seemingly simple stories with many layers of meaning. What seems, for example, to be a mundane youthful moment--skipping a religious service to sneak into a new car show--covers so much more: the longing for newness, the tedium of religious ritual, the passing of time, an encounter with a needy old woman, a Philip Larkin poem, the relief of not getting in trouble and conflicts in poetry and life between old and new. Shapiro can also be funny: describing his father's rueful meditations on the author's less-than-grand stature, he writes, ""even now, some thirty years later, whenever he sees me my father always shakes his head and says, `I can't understand it, Al, you had such big feet.'"" Shapiro also works poetry issues into chapters on his experience at Woodstock, conflicts with a girlfriend (who would eventually become his ex-wife), a friend's religious zealotry, the birth of his son and the death of his sister. Although he shows us the limitations of art, admitting that ""poems don't necessarily make us better spouses, parents, citizens or friends,"" he also shows us the power and importance of transformative art in life. (Oct.)