Mixed Company: Volume 1996

Product Description Respected poet, teacher, and critic Alan Shapiro continues his much-acclaimed explorations of childhood, family, and marriage in Mixed Company. Revealing a world troubled by difference while struggling toward commonality, and with equal attention to historical detail and the poetics of everyday life, from the mythic past to the abrasive intimacies of the present, Shapiro charts the many ways our social and sexual identities are formed, threatened, altered, and, for good or ill, preserved. Deeply felt and ambitious, Mixed Company is an extraordinary book by one of the leading poets writing in America today."What draws us into Alan Shapiro's Mixed Company is not a conspicuous felicity or any sort of bravura, but the quiet, undaunted way he goes after the truth of human feeling and motive. . . . The poems grope and conjecture, looking for understanding . . . but whatever may remain unsolved and insoluble, the poems are full of astonishing insights, a rare articulateness, and what another age called 'knowledge of the human heart.'" —Richard Wilbur From Library Journal The moments of Shapiro's poetry (e.g., Covenant, Univ. of Chicago, 1991) are those of simple exchange, occasions of friendship, marriage, and divorce. Listening for the traces of some greater life?the inaccessible days of a childhood maid apparent only in her cleaning; a friend on the bad end of an affair, aware of everything but unable to see; race relations as revealed through a basketball game ("Between Assassinations")?Shapiro practices the poem as a series of questions, arising and rolling out from single moments (a holdup, a suicide) each revealing tough new layers of convention and prejudice and further questions. Against this, there is only the insufficiency of memory, fragments of lost and unpossessable lives, the small portraits of painful intimacies, "old lore, old news, old burning certitudes we can't/ stoke high or hot enough, yet won't stop ever stoking/ until whatever it is we think we are anneals/ and toughens into an impenetrable shield." Recommended for larger collections.?Steven R. Ellis, Pennsylvania State Univ. Libs., College StationCopyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. About the Author Alan Shapiro has written many books of poetry and prose, most recently Against Translation, That Self-Forgetful Perfectly Useless Concentration, and Reel to Reel, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Shapiro  has won the Kingsley Tufts Award,   the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and an  American Academy of Arts and Letters literature award, among others, and has received fellowships from both the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He currently lives in Durham, North Carolina, with his dog, Sammy.