By Elizabeth Arnold
OLD WAR by Alan Shapiro
Houghton-Mifflin, 2008
ALAN SHAPIRO'S NEW BOOK OF poems depicts one man's present good luck caught in the parentheses of history--thus the title, Old War--a perspective made possible in large part by his past bad luck: the premature deaths of two siblings in quick succession, a divorce--subjects of many of Shapiro's earlier poems. But here, first-hand experience of loss opens the door to vivid imaginings of war, suicide bomb blasts and other forms of violent death, and the movement between personal and public is seamless, even blurred.
The sheer speed of the poems is partly responsible for this effect. Take, for example, how many of the titles are the first words of the poems' first sentences, further amplifying the breakneck movement (especially in poems made up of only one long sentence), and thereby creating a near recklessness fueled by the poet's fear that at any instant life will stop.
In this (Shapiro's tenth) book, the poems are dominated by what seems to be a paradoxical reverse-Heraclitean certainty--stasis being the dreaded constant rather than change--which reveals a new brand of panic in poems dramatizing our condition as mortal beings. The old paradox is made new by the very structure of Shapiro's sentences: "My voice forever scattering/away in echoes voices/I will never hear might sound?"; "I stopped where the snow/I had to stomp through/not to slip on/wouldn't break"; "so that she's nowhere/more like a girl, a child,/than in this/new way she's not." This kind of skewed syntactic logic recurs so often that the fact of our plight as mortals becomes a kind of drilling static which, by the time you've put the book down, sends you as if over a cliff, feet still churning like electric beater blades, moving too fast to be seen. You know to expect the screeching halt and plummet. And yet there's time in the terror of the moment to be transformed before the crisis of the catastrophic physical transformation. It's a whole new way into the ineffable that Shapiro's engineered, of being hurled into a space, into an experience where no one can exist while alive, propelled by the running start the poems cumulatively produce.
As in bebop, the speed is violent. It is channeled but buoyant rage. Shapiro's book could be said to be about fear of loss, but these poems speak specifically for and of an age that's going increasingly too fast, accelerating beyond our ability to comprehend the life it's engendering, coming close to exceeding the bounds of art itself.
Remarkably, in this breathless atmosphere, we find the beautiful lyrics one has come to expect of Shapiro, that play within the literary tradition they hope to extend. But the poems of Old War have a new formal quality, a jittery or fast-paced jagged movement driving them, as if the urgent need to keep up is meant, as well, to keep the reader from resting in any comfortable idea of tradition, beauty, or lyricism.
Some of the strongest poems in this quasi-lyric mode catch at fleeting moments with great subtlety, such as "Mist," which carries us through a cascade of associations inspired by the protean qualities of mist--"white ink in white water"--which then becomes the ghosts of Shapiro's deceased siblings, "brother mist and sister mist," their eyes "subsiding into mist," which vision becomes the "wordlessness that's opening to it" of a sleeping homeless person's open mouth, mist through which a bus then passes, mist flowing everywhere in the "spectral city" (with "grates"), mingling with the bus's exhaust, terrifyingly merging with it.
This threat of annihilation is felt to be everywhere, including in poems about love whose intensity is fed by a preternatural awareness that love will end, in illness, in death; or it is fated to turn into indifference, into hate. Thus, the intensity of love at its height--love of another person, love of life itself--is what stays with the reader, with a depth and density that distinguishes this volume as one of Shapiro's more outstanding achievements.
Elizabeth Arnold's most recent book of poems is Civilization, published by Flood Editions in 2006. She lives outside Washington, D.C.
Review by Elizabeth Arnold
