This World: Poems

by Harvey Shapiro

Shapiro, Harvey

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1971

About the author

Harvey Shapiro (January 27, 1924 – January 7, 2013) was an American poet and editor of The New York Times. He wrote a dozen books of poetry from 1953 to 2006, writing in epigrammatic style about things in his everyday life. As an editor, he was always affiliated with The New York Times in some capacity, mainly in the magazine and book reviews, from 1957 to 2005.

Reviews

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is the Brooklyn urban pastoral of Oppen's "Street," and the literary imagination of another pastoral Shapiro knows only through his marriage, the light he sees reflecting off his wife's body: So the editor of The New York Times Book Review waves, as from across a field, to the editor of The Sixties, because, as he thinks, "They are all so happy to make their images." But cross-stitching, he'll write: "Friend or foe, friend or foe, | She shouts. |The question doesn't apply, | He'd like to explain -- If the intercom would work, | Or the picture were real | Or if he hadn't just stepped out." The idiom ("stepped out") is a demotic exposing the predatory appeal he sees also in his master, William Carlos Williams; the book's first poem celebrates a night of carousing with the Doctor. He knows what's happened to him is a kind of success, yet "I put on the light | At 2 AM | and stand at the edge of a field." Shapiro sees the passage, but knows it is a wall: Bottom's wall. "You are too dependent | On what is placed before you: | The sea, a sunset | A long life." The life of this public poet commits Shapiro to an urban demotic, the novelist's narration: "'A story must be told in such a way | That it constitutes help in itself.'" That quotation is from Buber, but Shapiro struggles to outflank its wall-like ethos. Yiddish and Jewish mysticism are two passages, Armand Schwerner's Tablets a fuel. "Thanks and Praise" (the title of an ode to that mysticism) finds it in "the level floor as I cross it | . . . and to want no other thing | Of darkness."