After a lost original : a book of poems / David Shapiro.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Shapiro, David, 1947-2024.

Contributor:

Gotham Book Mart Collection (University of Pennsylvania)

Language:

English

Penn Provenance:

Gotham Book Mart (former owner) (Gotham Book Mart Collection copy)

Ott, Gil (donor) (inscription) (Ott Collection copy)

Shapiro, David, 1947- (autograph) (Ott Collection copy)

Physical Description:

88 pages ; 21 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Woodstock, N.Y. : Overlook Press, 1994.

Summary:

David Shapiro's new volume of poetry, After a Lost Original, emerges as a radically experimental volume of intellectual, erotic, and philosophical intensity. Exhibiting Shapiro's well-known musical ability, the poems melodically change tempo to create a dark divertimento of his underlying themes of multiplicity and doubt.

In miraculously weaving together the disparate strands of fatherhood, family romance, religion and politics, the title poem ingeniously challenges the very nature of poetic style, translation and interpretation. "The Seasons" and "Broken Objects, Discarded Landscape" aleatory elegies to nature itself, turn New York School Impressionism into something increasingly severe.

The passionate sonnets out of Virgil, a rhymed poem that fanatically parodies Yeats's famous prayer to a daughter, collaborations with Shapiro's young son, villanelles, poems of science and other visionary poems that break the secular taboo of the epoch display Shapiro's classical pull over inherently divergent structures.

By invoking a myriad of fictional characters, philosophers, histories, figures, furies and forms, David Shapiro celebrates the pluralistic poetic without abandoning the unique sense of power and perspicacity which mark his independence from all schools. The alluring images and envisioned ideas prove, as Harold Bloom wrote, "Few contemporaries can temper the expression of pathos with as much elegance as Shapiro can."

Contents:

After a Lost Original

The Snow Is Alive

Walter Benjamin: A Lost Poem

In Germany

After Asturiana

You Are Tall and Thin

Prayer for my Son

To My Son

House of the Secret

For Victims

After

A Part for the Part

Broken Objects, Discarded Landscape

Dido to Aeneas

Goofy Plays Second Fiddle in the Family Quartet

Sentences

Lucidity

You Are The You

A Dream

Untitled Dreams

"The Dead Will Not Praise You"

A Problem and Its Solution

House

Voice

A Night of Criticism

The Mistranslation

A Polaroid as Big as a Tapestry

Dreams of a Young Architect

Friday's Word

God Meets the Angel

The Boss Poem

A Lost Poem

Psalm

For Borges: Spinoza

An Evening Without Criticism

Problems of the Moon

The Uncertainty

A Private Embrace

A Note and Poem by Joe Ceravolo in a Dream

A Desert Rose

Multiple Suns

The Seasons.

Local Notes:

Ott Collection copy presented to the Penn Libraries by Gil Ott.

Ott Collection copy inscribed by the author to Gil Ott in 1994 in blue ink on title leaf.

Ott Collection copy has program ("Painted Bride Art Center & The New Arts Program present David Shapiro & Kevin Powell 31 March 1994") laid in.

Other Format:

Online version: Shapiro, David, 1947- After a lost original.

ISBN:

0879515279

9780879515270

OCLC:

29429022