by Harvey Shapiro
Wesleyan University Press 2006
Reviewed by Mike McDonough
Jewish Brooklynites, You Are Not Alone
The Sights Along the Harbor, subtitled New and Collected Poems, conveniently gathers, with a few omissions, Harvey Shapiro’s published poetry to date. Since his first book The Eye, published in 1953, Harvey Shapiro has built a concise and important body of work slowly and carefully. His work has moved away from the virtues espoused by the New Critics, but has also stayed apart from current trends, which has undoubtedly caused the recognition of his work to suffer. He cites as his forbears and teachers Whitman, Williams, Crane, Zukofsky and Oppen, though his poems sometimes remind me of a Jewish Frank O’Hara, if that makes any sense; they are deceptively simple, open, consistently short and anecdotal, verging on aphoristic, only occasionally marred by crabbiness, and often very funny:
Caught on a side street
In heavy traffic, I said
To the cabbie, I should
Have walked. He replied,
I should have been a doctor.
Citing Shapiro’s skill with anecdote does not do justice to the discipline he looks for in his craft. He knows with Martin Buber that “A story must be told in such a way/ That it constitutes help in itself.” For Shapiro, this help is never far from the last things, in ways that speak both inside and apart from his Orthodox Jewish background. Shapiro is solidly grounded in New York City, where he has lived most of his life. Time and again, Shapiro takes an image of Brooklyn, its bare reality, and lets the miracle of it touch him. Discussing the view of Manhattan skyscrapers from the Brooklyn Heights promenade, he writes:
They stand before us
Like tribal gods meting our success and unsuccess,
All that we have to lift our eyes to.
For Shapiro, desire is grounded in the body, and often expressed in unabashedly physical terms. His poems are sometimes burdened by an offhand anatomical coarseness but, at their best, take care to express desire nakedly enough to keep it from being simply beautiful, or resting content with metaphor. In “Jesus, Mary I Love You Save Souls,” the graffiti mentioned in the title reminds him of an image of his lover “head thrown back, legs parted.” He says “When we get to the dark part of the ride… Keep me in that light/ Subway car light/ Burning forever/ With that image/ In my brain.” While this has the beat of desire, the deliberate highlighting of the harsh subway car light has a way of letting body and soul cohabit in all their beauty and ugliness. Ultimately, reality is the goddess he lusts for.
Shapiro’s work is more anecdotal that that of his Objectivist forbears George Oppen and Charles Reznikoff, though it retains their moral concern. Reznikoiff especially cut through the world’s rhetoric with hard edged images, and straight reporting, reducing the “I,” honing the self as a lever for social change. Shapiro knows that we always carry our home with us, whether we are in Japan or Brooklyn Heights, and that the “I” is often resistant to change. He is not ashamed of his fallible, humanly limited point of view, and counts on candor to cut through the crap, including his own, while never taking himself too seriously:
He was looking for a
Universal message like,
Hemorrhoid sufferers
You are not alone.
Shapiro also knows how to approach the profound. “Italy 1944,” first published in 1994, is a legitimate addition to the canon of WWII poems (Shapiro has recently edited an anthology of WWII poetry). He addresses his own aging with candor and insight, but The Sights Along the Harbor is no how-to treatise of geriatrics. What I find most vital and relevant in this collection is his ability to turn a particular image into a paradoxical truth, letting it stand or fall on its own rather than masking it with terminal irony or overly broken syntax. His work affirms the value of poetry as a spiritual practice, making us want to read on, while also facing the fact that poetry by itself, vital as it is, solves nothing in the end.
In New York
at the end of the day
if you are pleased with yourself
and the human condition
and feel no survivor’s guilt,
you have added to the darkness.
*
Kathryn Stripling Byer’s poems in Coming to Rest are often indulgently sweet. The plush language and potentially captivating narrative are dulled by excessive sentimentality. The title poem of the book comes early on in Part 1 and immediately reveals Byer’s inability to let a stanza or a poem come to its natural ending point. The first section of this poem is engaging; the speaker tells the story of a mother whose child has died and obsessively she asks her remaining children to name their first daughter after their dead sibling. This compulsion seems to be what initially drives the poem into the second section, but Byer doesn’t allow it to do its work. Rather, she continues:
David Young’s tenth book of poetry, Black Lab, is largely concerned with growing old; however, this concern is not typical of the “fear of death” theme that dominates much poetry. It is not despondent or begrudging, but spirited and celebratory, indulging in the sweetness of a slower phase of life.
W.D. Snodgrass has a sense of humor about his surname; each of his three ex-wives were “more than pleased/to change it back,” he writes. And though it’s not nearly as iconic a name as Lowell, Berryman, Sexton, or Plath, a sufficient number of people still pay Snodsy (Sexton’s nickname) his dues as a pioneer of “confessional” poetry.
John Balaban’s talent is for gorgeous narrative and description, and in Path, Crooked Path, the two-time National Book Award nominee navigates classic predicaments: the one against the many, the poetic love of an unaffected world, a society helpless against its governing forces. What develops is a somewhat cynical but sympathetic vision of the American Empire: whether sooner or later, all empires collapse. By stepping in and out of the country, he shows genuine adoration for its place in a fluctuating whole. The book, Balaban’s fifth poetry volume, is a great antidote to a recent avalanche of poetry that confines itself to the function and hope of the 48 contiguous states. 
Henry Taylor’s eighth book of poetry Crooked Run—the winner of the L.E. Phillabaum Poetry Award—both begins and ends with the speaker walking the land that his family lived on for more than four generations. The second and final poems in the book are entitled “Creek Walk.” The first details the life of animals on the land and the second details their deaths on the same, how “the open jaws might appear to say/ we all must find our hard deathbeds.” These poems sandwich the life and stories of Taylor’s family on the land and, what’s most intriguing, what happens in between.