A Day's Portion

In a poem called ``Snapshot'' Shapiro ( National Cold Storage Company ) writes: ``I was listening to a black / clarinetist play Klezmer / at the Knitting Factory on Houston Street /in the bleak December of my 65th year. / Beer was Buber in my head. / My Jewish eyes were brimming. / I shuffled my feet. / I shook my head.'' The brief entirety of the poem and its verbatim emotion are characteristic. In his ninth collection, Shapiro chews an urban cud; he may pronounce, yet doesn't perform; and his emphatic sentence-making gives a memorable grounding in this place, not in that one--usually New York. He makes the strong seem strong, not heroic. He is warm, never effusive. Or, as ``Portrait'' puts it: ``He said everything / with a passionate conviction / . . . So the conviction came / not from knowledge / but from feeling.'' That must be why Shapiro's voice, here as before, seems tersely authentic. There are times, it's true, when his style of purposeful declaration is dogmatically sure of itself, as though that sureness had been chosen over challenges outside of it, routing complexity. If so, then sureness should be called into question. But Shapiro is willing to do that. He can't, like the rest of us, overcome all bounds, yet seems ready to admit them with a realist's grimace. And with poetry, in snapshots. (Apr.)