Bøger af Alan Shapiro

Alan Shapiro is at his most passionate in this collection. A work full of life, jealousy, lust, and romantic abandon, Tantalus in Love begins with the sorrow of a disintegrating marriage, with its anger and suspicion, its hurt and rage, but moves on to celebrate the resilience of love after loss and the awakening glory of an amorous middle age. Reinventing myth and symbol in lyrical portraits of astounding resonance, Shapiro's poems yearn with hesitant love, heated at renewal, fragile but intensified by past experience of love's evanescence and uncertainty.

The poems in Alan Shapiro's seventh collection, Song and Dance, intimately describe the complicated feelings that attend the catastrophic loss of a loved one. In 1998, Shapiro's brother, David, an actor on Broadway, was diagnosed with an incurable form of brain cancer. Song and Dance recounts the poet's emotional journey through the last months of his brother's life, exploring feelings too often ignored in official accounts of grief: horror, relief, impatience, exhaustion, exhilaration, fear, self-criticism, fulfillment.

"In this book from award-winning poet Alan Shapiro, the poet, in many ways, is coming to terms not only with his own mortality but also with the finite nature inherent in all human existence. Like the universe, it is full of strange, dark matter in its unflinching look at the unmaking of the self facilitated by our growing reliance on dehumanizing technology, something to which we can all attest in our viral-inflected era of remote living and working, and with so much of our energies focused on screens and keyboards. So much of what we are is being dumped into databases, into collective technological, medical, religious, political, and commercial languages, yet the poet continues to remind us of what's behind all of these technologies: humanity in all its frailties and virtues. Shapiro continues to evolve formally as a poet, as evidenced by the wide variety of prose poems, traditional lyrics, and experimental forms in this book, and although his abiding themes--family, human connection, and relationships--seem to come under a kind of assault in Proceed to Check Out, yet he continues to find the worth and vitality of the human endeavor and the pursuit of art. He remains committed to facing the hypocrisies and denials we'd much prefer to hide, and to exploring the social and psychological ties that bind all of us together in fully lived experience"--

As a little girl growing up in Boston, Miriam Bluestein fantasized about a life lived on stage, specifically in a musical. Get married, have a family-sure, maybe she''d do those things, too, but first and foremost there was her career. As a woman, she is both tormented and consoled by those dreams in her day-to-day existence with her family, including a short-tempered husband, a cranky mother, and three demanding children, one of whom, Ethan, shows real talent for the stage. It is through Ethan that Miriam strives to realize her dreams. As she pushes him to make the most of his talent, the rest of her life gradually comes undone, with her husband becoming increasingly frustrated and her other two children-Sam, a mass of quirks and idiosyncrasies, and Julie, hostile and bitter-withdrawing into their own worlds. Still Miriam dreams, praying for that big finale, which, when it comes, is nothing that she ever could have imagined. Broadway Baby marks the fiction debut of a nationally acclaimed award-winning memoirist and poet, "an acute observer of moments, people, art and language [who] packs even seemingly simple stories with many layers of meaning" (Publishers Weekly, starred review).

Where are we going? What are we doing here? you don't ask, you don't notice the blur of stations we're racing past, the others out there watching in the dim light, baffled, who for a moment thought the train was theirs. This book offers a collection of poetry.

Based on the conviction that only translators who write poetry themselves can properly re-create the celebrated and timeless tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the Greek Tragedy in New Translations offers new translations that go beyond the literal meaning of the Greek in order to evoke the poetry of the originals. Collected here for the first time in the series are four major works by Euripides all set in Athens: Hippoltos, translated by Robert Bagg, a dramatic interpretation of the tragedy of Phaidra; Suppliant Women, translated by Rosanna Warren and Steven Scully, a powerful examination of the human psyche; Ion, translated by W. S. Di Piero and Peter Burian, a complex enactment of the changing relations between the human and divine orders; and The Children ofHerakles, translated by Henry Taylor and Robert A. Brooks, a descriptive tale of the descendants of Herakles and their journey home. These four tragedies were originally avialble as single volumes. This volume retains the informative introductions and explanatory notes of the original editions and adds a single combines glossary and Greekline numbers.