The Dead Alive and Busy

Alan Shapiro has, in this volume, created a world where, for better or for worse, the past is not missing: instead, it walks around in our world, befriending us or pestering us, stopping at nothing, even death. And yet these are poems of loss, or loss that will not complete itself, as in Joyce's "absence is the highest form of presence."Take the poem "Ghost," in which a dead woman speaks to her widower: even the past is haunted by its own past. Or the poems of or to the speaker's dead or dying relatives & loved ones: the touches that have ended in withdrawn hands but remain in lingering feeling.Shapiro's knowledge of poetry is astounding, & he uses that knowledge (which is, by the way, so much more than mere knowledge) to build subtle, strong, and elegant poetry. He has been doing it for years; his earlier work--excellent as it is--is mere exercize for the power of The Dead Alive and Busy.

The Times reviewer is right that THE DEAD ALIVE AND BUSY is "weighted with grief," but that's only the half of it. Shapiro is a master of structure, a poetic maker who understands that what makes grief bearable is the song the poet builds to contain feeling. This volume begins with an extraordinary hymn to Apollo, a poem which points to the way that poetry's work is to marry the pleasures of music to the stuff of human experience -- to sing, in other words, about our suffering, our failures and our nobility. It's a poem that points to this collection's project, and prepares us for the deep humanity, psychological insight, and formal grace of the poems that follow. This is one of the best books of the year.