Song and dance / Alan Shapiro.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Shapiro, Alan, 1952-

Contributor:

Gotham Book Mart Collection (University of Pennsylvania)

Language:

English

Penn Provenance:

Gotham Book Mart (former owner) (Gotham Book Mart Collection copies 1 & 2)

Physical Description:

59 pages ; 22 cm

Other Title:

Song & dance

Place of Publication:

Boston : Houghton Mifflin, 2002.

Summary:

The poems in prize-winning poet Alan Shapiro's new collection celebrate art as a woefully inadequate yet necessary source of comfort. In 1998, Shapiro's brother, David, was diagnosed with an incurable form of brain cancer -- just three years after the poet's sister died of breast cancer. David Shapiro was an actor on Broadway whose career embodied the joys of life -- he was a song-and-dance man. Shapiro's poem cycle recounts his emotional journey through the last months of his brother's life.

The poems in Song and Dance intimately describe the complicated feelings that attend the catastrophic loss of a loved one, feelings too often ignored in official accounts of grief: horror, relief, impatience, exhaustion, exhilaration, fear, self-criticism, fulfillment. While the occasion for the poems is tragic, the experience of reading them is as complex as the emotions they recreate. They are at times funny, angry, passionate, and heartbreaking. Finally, these poems are songs of lament that are also songs of praise, transforming grief through the supreme beauty of human attachment. "In the hands of this masterful poet, the struggle is bodied forth in a hard-won, aching music" (Mark Doty).

Contents:

Everything the Traffic Will Allow 1

Transistor Radio 4

Sleet 8

Scan 10

The Match 17

The Phone Call 23

The Accident 25

Joy 28

Up Against 31

The Last Scene 33

Fly 37

The Big Screen 39

Three Questions 41

Broadway Revival 43

If I Only Knew Then 46

The Old Man 49

To the Body 50

Song and Dance 54

Last Impressions 57.

Local Notes:

Gotham Book Mart Collection copy 2 has dustjacket retained.

ISBN:

0618152857

OCLC:

47667422