Synopsis
Kingsley Tufts Award winner Alan Shapiro is at his most passionate in this new collection full of life, jealousy, lust, and romantic abandon.
Tantalus in Love begins with the disintegration of a marriage, with anger and suspicion. But from sorrow Shapiro moves to celebrate the resilience of love after loss, and the awakening glory of an amorous middle age. In "Invocation" he writes, "Love . . . let there be never again / a moment in which / your sudden shining isn't / sudden." These poems yearn with hesitant love, heated at renewal, fragile but intensified by past experience of love’s evanescence and uncertainty. "Iris / love flower of the middle-aged . . . the stalk / bends under the unexpected weight . . . how did I ever live without you?" Tantalus in Love reinvents myth and symbol in lyrical portraits of astounding resonance, illuminating this defining vulnerability of humanity.
Publishers Weekly
If love is the province of poets, slow, grinding breakups are usually novelist's territory. The figure of Tantalus takes the form of a husband, who, after 20 years of marriage, admires his wife as she rises before him in the morning and "knows he'll never touch her again." These autobiographical poems, which refer to events covered in Shapiro's Song and Dance (the death of his brother) and After the Digging (the death of his sister), remember joys, express daily care for children as things come apart, turn over past grievances, and project infinite future grief. The presiding spirit is Robert Lowell at his chiseled best, but Shapiro has something, too, of Frost's grim depersonalization. If Shapiro doesn't quite hit his own pitch perfectly, as he did in Song and Dance, he takes well-wrought stock of a disappearing relation. The title poem, about the unbearable uncertainty of his wife's fidelity, is like listening in, unbearably, on the nearly mute Richard Gere character from Unfaithful as Diane Lane dresses before him. (Apr.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.