Night of the Republic - Rilegato

Shapiro, Alan

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0547329709 ISBN 13: 9780547329703

Casa editrice: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012

Riassunto

An urgent and timely collection by one of America’s most inventive and accessible poets

In Night of the Republic, Alan Shapiro takes us on an unsettling night tour of America’s public places—a gas station restroom, shoe store, convention hall, and race track among others—and in stark Edward Hopper–like imagery reveals the surreal and dreamlike features of these familiar but empty night spaces. Shapiro finds in them not the expected alienation but rather an odd, companionable solitude rising up from the quiet emptiness.

In other poems, Shapiro writes movingly of his 1950s and 60s childhood in Brookline, Massachusetts, with special focus on the house he grew up in. These meditations, always inflected with Shapiro’s quick wit and humor, lead to recollections of tragic and haunting events such as the Cuban missile crisis and the assassination of JFK. While Night of the Republic is Shapiro’s most ambitious work to date, it is also his most timely and urgent for the acute way it illuminates the mingling of private obsessions with public space.

Su questo libro

Recensione:

Old War

"Shapiro keeps imagining new turns of mind and phrase." —Washington Post

"[Shapiro's] poems maintain the compression and intensity of lyric, they also open to the twists and bursts of colloquial American speech . . . both artful and unpretentious." —Boston Globe

 

Tantalus in Love

"A profound meditation on the elusiveness of happiness." —Philadelphia Inquirer

"Shapiro seeks what lies at the deepest level of the human heart." —Chicago Tribune

"A masterpiece." —Missouri Review

 

The Last Happy Occasion

"Touching and intelligent, an emotionally satisfying and eloquent testimony to the power of poetry to instruct, heal and inspire." —New York Times Book Review

"Shapiro moves from the personal to the social to the artistic in an admirably honest fashion; it is a model of writing using a difficult literary technique to give structure to harsh personal experiences and thoughts. An excellent piece of work." —Library Journal

"[Shapiro] shows us the power and importance of transformative art in life." —Publishers Weekly

 

Happy Hour

"Shapiro has cultivated a new generosity of detail and insight." —New York Times Book Review

"Happy Hour is one of the best collections I have recently read. Mr. Shapiro writes with apparently equal ease in free verse and more nearly traditional forms, and he brings his formidable technical skills to bear upon matters of great urgency: our need to love and be loved, and the often perverse ways in which we maintain our connections to those closest to us." —Washington Times

"A haunting, mature collection that should attract a larger audience for Shapiro's fine poems." —Chicago Tribune

"Alan Shapiro's Happy Hour is one of the best books I've read in recent years. His subject is the agony caused by our unrelenting need to love and be loved, a need he portrays as fundamental, however destructive. This great but risky material Shapiro handles with a charitable poise. His poems have generosity and elegance. Their formal beauty always serves emotional and intellectual purposes." —Robert Pinsky

"Shapiro's language is charged with the involutions and perversities of human motivation and feeling, while it remains clean, accessible, forged. Happy Hour is powerful because it is beautifully made." – Frank Bidart

"These poems are not likely to be forgotten." —J. D. McClatchy

Dalla quarta di copertina:

Praise for Alan Shapiro

“What makes Shapiro so important to American poetry right now is the success with which he’s taken over the territory of fiction writers. While his poems maintain the compression and intensity of lyric, they also open to the twists and bursts of colloquial American speech, that mongrel medium with which we craft our lives together . . . His poems are both artful and unpretentious.”—Boston Review

[Shapiro] seeks what lies at the deepest level of the human heart.”—Chicago Tribune Books

“Mr. Shapiro is a shrewd and sympathetic moralist. He never trivializes his subjects with high-minded flourishes or stylistic gimmicks . . . [H]is seriousness is admirable . . . [and his] poems are not likely to be forgotten.”—New York Times

“[In Shapiro’s poems], the intensity of love at its height—love of another person, love of life itself—is what stays with the reader, with a depth and density that [is] one of Shapiro’s more outstanding achievements.”—Tikkun

“[Shapiro holds] fast to love and joy in an often unjust, brutal world.”—Washington Post

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Data di pubblicazione: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0547329709
• ISBN 13: 9780547329703
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 95