By and By : poems

“Alan Shapiro has written some of the most piercing anti-elegiac elegies of
our time. He’s addressed social issues with a rare linguistic inventiveness that
makes him a citizen of the world of language, free of cant, attitudinizing, or
moral hand wringing. The recursive nature of his syntax can capture every
self-contradictory flicker of consciousness as it grapples with how love turns
to lovelessness, and how we connive at our own misfortunes even as we
suffer them. In his new book, By and By, however dark his subject matter
might seem—extinction of self and species, the inevitable hypocrisies and
double-binds of mismatched lovers, the fact of age and aging as a moment
by moment process of physical debilitation and slow disappearance from
the world—the utter joyousness that he takes in every line he writes makes
every poem feel like a triumph of poetic consciousness. But it’s not so much
a triumph over anything, as it is a sense of being continuous with everything.
In poem after poem, his language finds unique ways to dignify and uplift
whatever his imagination lights on. There is nothing too small or too large
for the radical inclusiveness of his attention.” — Tom Sleigh, author of The King’s Touch