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Song and Dance : Poems
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Song and Dance : Poems Hardcover - 2002

by Shapiro, Alan, Shapiro, Alan C

  • Used

Description

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Used - Very Good. Former library book; may include library markings. Used book that is in excellent condition. May show signs of wear or have minor defects.
Used - Very Good
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Details

  • Title Song and Dance : Poems
  • Author Shapiro, Alan, Shapiro, Alan C
  • Binding Hardcover
  • Edition First Edition
  • Condition Used - Very Good
  • Pages 80
  • Volumes 1
  • Language ENG
  • Publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, Boston
  • Date 2002-02-21
  • Bookseller's Inventory # 38301301-6
  • ISBN 9780618152858 / 0618152857
  • Weight 0.55 lbs (0.25 kg)
  • Dimensions 8.66 x 5.7 x 0.48 in (22.00 x 14.48 x 1.22 cm)
  • Library of Congress Catalog Number 2001039527
  • Dewey Decimal Code 811.54

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Summary

Alan Shapiro's seventh collection celebrates art as a woefully inadequate yet necessary source of comfort. "Amazingly sensitive and tough-minded" (Tom Sleigh), the poems in Song and Dance intimately describe the complicated feelings that attend the catastrophic loss of a loved one. In 1998, Shapiro's brother, David, an actor on Broadway, was diagnosed with an incurable form of brain cancer. Song and Dance recounts the poet's emotional journey through the last months of his brother's life, exploring feelings too often ignored in official accounts of grief: horror, relief, impatience, exhaustion, exhilaration, fear, self-criticism, fulfillment.

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Excerpt

Everything the Traffic Will Allow

The two boys don’t suspect they don’t exist.
And Ethel Merman is the shade of a shade — what Plato says all poetry is — a record spinning beneath a needle as the boys lip-sync into imaginary mikes her glottal swagger, brassy, large, streetwise and from their mouths so touchingly naive for being so . . . There’s no people like show people . . .
Their parents clap and whistle from the bed, propped up on pillows . . . Everything about it is appealing . . . They are shouting “Encore! Bravo!” when the boys, like chorus girls, arms on each other’s shoulders, step-kick their way across the room and out of it, then back . . .
stealing that extra bow . . . Shades of a shade.
What poetry is. Because there’s nowhere else for them to be except inside the room in which it isn’t when it is, in which there is no room unless I think of it —

the boys their arms flung wide on one knee mouthing the last words before the needle slides off into silence, the parents propped up on pillows, half laughing, half shouting “Bravo!
Encore!” All now just the shade of a shade — like no people I know . . .

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