Old War

With its many characters, forms and storylines and its repeated looks at death and old age, this tenth outing from the widely-respected Shapiro (Mixed Company) could be both the saddest, and the most various, of his works. The poet opens with meticulous stanzas about transience and loss, from the newsworthy casualties of suicide bombs to the passing shadows in bedrooms and trains. He concludes with marvelously inventive poems about male professions and types, each with his own form of sin and pain-a ""Country-Western Singer"" whose rough rhymes describe an alcoholic's arc, a dying political fixer (""Handler"") whose Southern-fried diction belies his Tolstoyan regret. In between come lyric poems of autobiography, in blank verse and in clipped short lines. In one pathos-filled page of prose, new amours and familial affections coexist with repeated mourning-for his late sister and brother and for the diminished capacities of his ailing parents, who have moved in with him. Shapiro writes well of athletes' achievements, of his own day-to-day choices, of pride and hope. He sounds most at home, though, with disappointment, resignation and grief, as in ""Last Wedding Attended by the Gods"": ""Love was/ the sensation/ of the promise of// more love to come,"" he writes there: ""Nothing ever/ changed/ until it did.""