Selected Poems

by Karl Shapiro, John Updike (Editor)

In this new selection, master literary craftsman John Updike provides a long-overdue reassessment of Karl Shapiro, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who has become one of the defining figures of the postwar period.

Genres: Poetry

197 pages, Hardcover

First published January 27, 2003

About the author

Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet, appointed the fifth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1946.

Reviews

[robin friedman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Karl Shapiro In The American Poets Project

The Library of America founded the American Poets Project in 2003 to present the work of American Poets who generally were not fully represented in the LOA's main series. In the words of David Starkey: "[n]ow at 32 volumes, the series offers an eccentric and largely gratifying look at many of the lesser lights of American poetry". (Santa Barbara Independent, April 30, 2019). Among the writers included in the American Poets Project is Karl Shapiro, (1913 -- 2000) in this 2003 volume of Selected Poems edited and introduced by John Updike (1932 -- 2009). The volume offers a good selection of works from throughout Shapiro's career from the early 1940s through the early 1990s together with Updike's thoughtful overview of Shapiro's work. This brief volume might serve to carry forward Shapiro's work to current and future readers and to prevent it from being forgotten.

Shapiro was born in Baltimore and served three years as a medic in New Guinea during WW II. From just before his service and through and beyond it, Shapiro wrote prolifically. His writings brought home to readers the war experience with its death and destruction through the return of the soldiers in sailors in a poem titled "Homecoming". I am writing this review on December 24: thus here is a Shapiro poem from the war years titled "Christmas Eve, Australia".

"The wind blows hot, English and foreign birds
And insects different as their fish excite
The would-be calm. The usual flocks and herds
Parade in permanent quiet out of sight,
And there on crystal like a grain of light
Sticks in the crucible of the day and cools.
A cloud burnt to a crisp at some great height
Sips at the dark condensing in deep pools.

I smoke and read my Bible and chew gum,
Thinking of Christ and Christmas of last year,
And what these quizzical soldiers standing near
Ask of the war and Christmases to come,
And sick of causes and the tremendous blame
Curse lightly and pronounce your serious name."

During these years, Shapiro also wrote poems about his pre-war life and about finding beauty in everyday seemingly pedestrian objects, such as the poems "Buick" and "Honkytonk". He also wrote poems about how he saw his relationship to Judaism and his Jewishness. Shapiro received substantial recognition for his early poetry, including the Pulitzer Prize and an appointment to what is now the position of United States Poet Laureate from 1946 -- 47.

In the mid-1960s, Shapiro's poetry took a new direction. The early poems, such as the poem quoted above, are traditional in form in rhyme and meter. Many other poets of his time had written in more modernist forms. Shapiro's "The Bourgeoise Poet" published in 1964 shows the influence of Walt Whitman and the Beats. the book consisted of untitled prose poems with sprawling themes, and lengthy unmetered lines and paragraphs. Titles subsequently were added to the individual poems, which include works such as "The Bourgeois Poet", "High School" "Burlesque" and "I am an Atheist who says his prayers".

The poems could be irreverent, satirical and critical. However, Shapiro, unlike many other writers, retained a positive view of America and of the middle, middling class of which he was a part A generous selection from the "Bourgeois Poet" is included in this volume of selected poems.

The poems in this volume center around the early writings and around "The Bourgeoise Poet". The works written between the two and after "The Bourgeoise Poet" seem largely to return to Shapiro's earlier style. His poem shows a modern, personal sensibility informed by a basic conservatism which makes his work unusual.

I had read some of Karl Shapiro before and enjoyed broadening my reading of his work with this selection. I liked his Jewish-themed works, including "My Grandmother", "The Synagogue", "Israel", "The First Time", "The Convert", and "My Father's Funeral". I also enjoyed the poems satirizing intellectual life and its frequent pretentiousness and the many love poems in the volume.

This volume and the American Poets Series performs a service both in making the works of Karl Shapiro accessible and also in allowing readers to explore the creative breadth and variety of American poetry.

Robin Friedman

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

From Person, Place and Thing (1942)...

As a sloop with a sweep of immaculate wing on her delicate spine
And a keel as steel as a root that holds in the sea as she leans,
Leaning and laughing, my warm-hearted beauty, you ride, you ride,
You tack on the curves with parabola speed and a kiss of goodbye,
Like a thoroughbred sloop, my new high-spirited spirit, my kiss.

As my foot suggests that you leap in the air with your hips of a girl,
My finger that praises your wheel and announces your voices of song,
Flouncing your skirts, you blueness of joy, you flirt of politeness,
You leap, you intelligence, essence of wheelness with silvery nose,
And your platinum clocks of excitement stir like the hairs of a fern.

But how alien you are from the booming belts of your birth and the smoke
Where you turned on the stinging lathes of Detroit and Lansing at night
And shrieked at the torch in your secret parts and the amorous tests,
But now with your eyes that enter the future of roads you forget;
You are all instinct with your phosphorous glow and your streaking hair.

And now when we stop it is not as the bird from the shell that I leave
Or the leathery pilot who steps from his bird with a sneer of delight,
And not as the ignorant beast do you squat and watch me depart,
But with exquisite breathing you smile, with satisfaction of love,
And I touch you again as you tick in the silence and settle in sleep.

- Buick, pg. 13-14

From The Place of Love (1942)...

As a slug on the flat of the sun-heated clay,
With the spit of its track left behind it like glass,
Imperceptibly voyages, licking its way
In the sinuous slime of itself to the grass,

So my tongue on the white-heated wall of your thigh
Licks its belly across, and the path of my slime
Lies in ribbons of passion, the wet and the dry
Overlapping to mount to the leaf of its climb.

And the mouth and the mouth and the tongue and the tongue
And the fishes that feed in the joy of our oil
And the slug of our wetness finds green food among
The hair-forests of longing where serpents uncoil.

- The Tongue, pg. 37

From V-Letter and Other Poems (1944)...

The man behind the book may not be man,
His own man or the book’s or yet the time’s,
But still be whole, deciding what he can
In praise of politics or German rimes;

But the intellectual lights a cigarette
And offers it lit to the lady, whose odd smile
Is the merest hyphen—lest he should forget
What he has been resuming all the while.

He talks to overhear, she to withdraw
To some interior feminine fireside
Where the back arches, beauty puts forth a paw
Like a black puma stretching in velvet pride,

Making him think of cats, a stray of which
Some days sets up a howling in his brain,
Pure interference such as this neat bitch
Seems to create from listening disdain.

But talk is all the value, the release,
Talk is the very fillip of an act,
The frame and subject of the masterpiece
Under whose film of age the face is cracked.

His own forehead glows like expensive wood,
But back of it the mind is disengaged,
Self-sealing clock recording bad and good
At constant temperature, intact, unaged.

But strange, his body is an open house
Inviting every passerby to stay;
The city to and fro beneath his brows
Wanders and drinks and chats from night to day.

Think of a private thought, indecent room
Where one might kiss his daughter before bed!
Life is embarrassed; shut the family tomb,
Console your neighbor for his recent dead;

Do something! die in Spain or paint a green
Gouache, go into business (Rimbaud did),
Or start another Little Magazine,
Or move in with a woman, have a kid.

Invulnerable, impossible, immune,
Do what you will, your will will not be done
But dissipate the light of afternoon
Till evening flickers like the midnight sun,

And midnight shouts and dies: I’d rather be
A milkman walking in his sleep at dawn
Bearing fat quarts of cream, and so be free,
Crossing alone and cold from lawn to lawn.

I’d rather be a barber and cut hair
Than walk with you in gilt museum halls,
You and the puma-lady, she so rare
Exhaling her silk soul upon the walls.

Go take yourselves apart, but let me be
The fault you find with everyman. I spit,
I laugh, I fight; and you, l’homme qui rît;
Swallow your stale saliva, and still sit.

- The Intellectual, pg. 65-66

From Essay on Rime (1945)...

Resultantly, all that once had seemed inherent
And lawful in composition now appeared
Not stale but actually incoherent. Form
Became the atoms that bombard the senses;
The composer became a compositor; the line
Crumbled to bits of syllable, and design
All but supplanted count of eye and ear;
Until the day arrived when many a poet
Sat with a lapful of pied type and lead
And puzzled over the fragments, while some few
Descanted on the attraction of the new.

- Breakdown of Metric, pg. 72

From Trial of a Poet (1947)...

The gates clanged and they walked you into jail
More tense than felons but relieved to find
The hostile world shut out, the flags that dripped
From every mother’s windowpane, obscene
The bloodlust sweating from the public heart,
The dog authority slavering at your throat.
A sense of quiet, of pulling down the blind
Possessed you. Punishment you felt was clean.

The decks, the catwalks, and the narrow light
Composed a ship. This was a mutinous crew
Troubling the captains for plain decencies,
A Mayflower brim with pilgrims headed out
To establish new theocracies to west,
A Noah’s ark coasting the topmost seas
Ten miles above the sodomites and fish.
These inmates loved the only living doves.

Like all men hunted from the world you made
A good community, voyaging the storm
To no safe Plymouth or green Ararat;
Trouble or calm, the men with Bibles prayed,
The gaunt politicals construed our hate.
The opposite of all armies, you were best
Opposing uniformity and yourselves;
Prison and personality were your fate.

You suffered not so physically but knew
Maltreatment, hunger, ennui of the mind.
Well might the soldier kissing the hot beach
Erupting in his face damn all your kind.
Yet you who saved neither yourselves nor us
Are equally with those who shed the blood
The heroes of our cause. Your conscience is
What we come back to in the armistice.

- The Conscientious Objector, pg. 79

From Poems 1940-1953 (1953)...

Two hands lie still, the hairy and the white,
And soon down ladders of reflected light
The sleepers climb in silence. Gradually
They separate on paths of long ago,
Each winding on his arm the unpleasant clew
That leads, live as a nerve, to memory.

But often when too steep her dream descends,
Perhaps to the grotto where her father bends
To pick her up, the husband wakes as though
He had forgotten something in the house.
Motionless he eyes the room that glows
With the little animals of light that prowl

This way and that. Soft are the beasts of light
But softer still her hand that drifts so white
Upon the whiteness. How like a water-plant
It floats upon the black canal of sleep,
Suspended upward from the distant deep
In pure achievement of its lovely want!

Quietly then he plucks it and it folds
And is again a hand, small as a child’s.
He would revive it but it barely stirs
And so he carries it off a little way
And breaks it open gently. Now he can see
The sweetness of the fruit, his hand eats hers.

- Love for a Hand, pg. 102-103

From Poems of a Jew (1958)...

The letters of the Jews as strict as flames
Or little terrible flowers lean
Stubbornly upwards through the perfect ages,
Singing through solid stone and sacred names.
The letters of the Jews are black and clean
And lie in chain-line over Christian pages.
The chosen letters bristle like barbed wire
That hedge the flesh of man,
Twisting and tightening the book that warns.
These words, this burning bush, this flickering pyre
Unsacrifices the bled son of man
Yet plaits his crown of thorns.

Where go the tipsy idols of the Roman
Past synagogues of patient time,
Where go the sisters of the Gothic rose,
Where go the blue eyes of the Polish women
Past the almost natural crime,
Past the still speaking embers of ghettos,
There rise the tinder flowers of the Jews.
The letters of the Jews are dancing knives
That carve the heart of darkness seven ways.
These are the letters that all men refuse.
And will refuse until the king arrives
And will refuse until the death of time
And all is rolled back in the book of days.

- The Alphabet, pg. 109-110

From The Bourgeois Poet (1964)...

I am an atheist who says his prayers.

I am an anarchist, and a full professor at that. I take the loyalty oath.

I am a deviate. I fondle and contribute, backscuttle and brown, father of three.

I stand high in the community. My name is in Who’s Who. People argue about my modesty.

I drink my share and yours and never have enough. I free-load officially and unofficially.

A physical coward, I take on all intellectuals, established poets, popes, rabbis, chiefs of staff.

I am a mystic. I will take an oath that I have seen the Virgin. Under the dry pandanus, to the scratching of kangaroo rats, I achieve psychic onanism. My tree of nerves electrocutes itself.

I uphold the image of America and force my luck. I write my own ticket to oblivion.

I am of the race wrecked by success. The audience brings me news of my death. I write out of boredom, despise solemnity. The wrong reason is good enough for me.

I am of the race of the prematurely desperate. In poverty of comfort I lay gunpowder plots. I lapse my insurance.

I am the Babbitt metal of the future. I never read more than half of a book. But that half I read forever.

I love the palimpsest, statues without heads, fertility dolls of the continent of Mu. I dream prehistory, the invention of dye. The palms of the dancers’ hands are vermillion. Their heads oscillate like the cobra. High-caste woman smelling of earth and silk, you can dry my feet with your hair.

I take my place beside the Philistine and unfold my napkin. This afternoon I defend the Marines. I goggle at long cars.

Without compassion I attack the insane. Give them the horsewhip!

The homosexual lectures me brilliantly in the beer booth. I can feel my muscles soften. He smiles at my terror.

Pitchpots flicker in the lemon groves. I gaze down on the plains of Hollywood. My fine tan and my arrogance, my gray hair and my sneakers, O Israel!

Wherever I am I become. The power of entry is with me. In the doctor’s office a patient, calm and humiliated. In the foreign movies a native, shabby enough. In the art gallery a person of authority (there’s a secret way of approaching a picture. Others move off). The high official insults me to my face. I say nothing and accept the job. He offers me whiskey.

How beautifully I fake! I convince myself with men’s room jokes and epigrams. I paint myself into a corner and escape on pulleys of the unknown. Whatever I think at the moment is true. Turn me around in my tracks; I will take your side.

For the rest, I improvise and am not spiteful and water the plants on the cocktail table.

- I Am an Atheist Who Says His Prayers, pg. 130-133

From Selected Poems (1968)...

The beauty of manhole covers--what of that?
Like medals struck by a great savage khan,
Like Mayan calendar stones, unliftable, indecipherable,
Not like the old electrum, chased and scored,
Mottoed and sculptured to a turn,
But notched and whelked and pocked and smashed
With the great company names
(Gentle Bethlehem, smiling United States).
This rustproof artifact of my street,
Long after roads are melted away will lie
Sidewise in the grave of the iron-old world,
Bitten at the edges,
Strong with its cryptic American,
Its dated beauty.

- Manhole Cover, pg. 137

From White-Haired Lover (1968)...

What dawn is it?
The morning star stands at the end of your street as you watch me turn to laugh a kind of goodbye, with
love-crazed head like a white satyr moving through wet bushes.
The morning star bursts in my eye like a hemorrhage as I enter my car in a dream surrounded by your
heavenly-earthly smell.
The steering wheel is sticky with dew,
The golf course is empty, husbands stir in their sleep desiring, and though no cocks crow in suburbia, the
birds are making a hell of a racket.
Into the newspaper dawn as sweet as your arms that hold the old new world, dawn of green lights that
smear the empty streets with come and go.
It is always dawn when I say goodnight to you,
Dawn of wrecked hair and devastated beds,
Dawn when protective blackness turns to blue and lovers drive sunward with peripheral vision.
To improvise a little on Villon
Dawn is the end for which we are together.
My house of loaded ashtrays and unwashed glasses, tulip petals and columbine that spill on the table
and splash on the floor,
My house full of your dawns,
My house where your absence is presence,
My slum that loves you, my bedroom of dustmice and cobwebs, of local paintings and eclectic posters,
my bedroom of rust neckties and divorced mattresses, and of two of your postcards, Pierrot with Flowers and Young Girl with Cat,
My bed where you have thrown your body down like a king’s ransom or a boa constrictor.
But I forgot to say: May passed away last night,
May died in her sleep,
That May that blessed and kept our love in fields and motels.
I erect a priapic statue to that May for lovers to kiss as long as I’m in print, and polish as smooth as the
Pope’s toe.
This morning came June of spirea and platitudes,
This morning came June discreetly dressed in gray,
June of terrific promises and lawsuits.
And where are the poems that got lost in the shuffle of spring?
Where is the poem about the eleventh of March, when we raised the battleflag of dawn?
Where is the poem about the coral necklace that whipped your naked breasts in leaps of love?
The poem concerning the ancient lover we followed through your beautiful sleeping head?
The fire-fountain of your earthquake thighs and your electric mouth?
Where is the poem about the little one who says my name and watches us almost kissing in the sun?
The vellum stretchmarks of your learned belly,
Your rosy-fingered nightgown of nylon and popcorn,
Your razor that caresses your calves like my hands?
Where are the poems that are already obsolete, leaves of last month, a very historical month?
Maybe I’ll write them, maybe I won’t, no matter,
And this is the end for which we are together.
Et c’est la fin pour quoy sommes ensembles.

- Aubade, pg. 148-150

From Adult Bookstore (1976)...

My fame's not feeling well;
Maybe I should get it a Fulbright
To Luxembourg or Mexico,
Or maybe send it to a doctor-critic:
The doctor will say: "It should join a committee
Or win a national prize
Or judge a contest or apologize
For something, or just crawl out of its shell.
There's really nothing I can recommend."

Maybe I'll send it to Chicago where
A cabdriver once recognized it
Driving to O'Hare.

On the other hand I'd rather let it ail,
Being quite certain that it cannot fail
And simply come to an oblivious end.
Maybe it only needs a famous friend.

All the same it is slightly diabetic
And drinks more than its share of dry white wine,
But takes its dyazide and reserpine.

Sloth, acedia, ennui, otiose pride
Got it into this fix, so let it be.
I'm not the one to take its history.

- My Fame's Not Feeling Well, pg. 158

From Collected Poems 1940-1978 (1978)...

Without him many of us would have never happened
But would have gone on being Georgians or worse;
We all recall how he galloped into verse
Or Skelton's nag and easily reopened

Eighteenth-century prosody like a can of worms,
And there like Alice on a checkerboard
Careened through Marx and Freud and Kierkegaard
Dazzled and dazzling all the ideas and forms,

And camped out in the United States to wrinkle
Like a Native American awaiting the Nobel Prize
And study savages with paleface eyes
And sit on Oxford Dictionaries and rankle.

God bless this poet who took the honest chances;
God bless the live poets whom his death enhances.

- W.H.A., pg. 160

From New & Selected Poems 1940-1986 (1987)...

It lies on its side in the grassy Mall
A capsized V, a skeletal
Half-sunken hull of a lost cause
Between the Washington Monument and the Capitol.

To see it you descend a downward path
And stare up at the blackened decks of names,
Army of names that holds this cenotaph
Shimmering in shadow in the fosse.

Topside you can hear children at their games,
Down in this trench is no gab,
Someone lays flowers under a name that was,
Our eyes like seaworms crawl across the slab.

Coasting the fifty-thousand here who died,
We surface breathless, come up bleary-eyed.

- Vietnam Memorial, pg. 166

From The Old Horsefly (1992)...

Remember the old days when the luxury liners in narrow Manhattan
appeared piecemeal in segments at the end of east-west streets,
a black-and-white section of portholes and stripes of decks
and slowly the majesty of the great red funnel,
even the olympian basso of its homing horn?
It would take a full half hour to go past,
as if in no hurry to pass into history.

But look there at the top pane of the window!
A burnished skyliner elegantly moving north,
as proud as leviathan above the suffering Hudson,
past the unfinished cathedral, over Grant's tomb,
into the blue-gray morning of the future-past.

- Future-Present, pg. 178

[Stephen · Rating 2 out of 5]

A few of the poems in here were good, but overall this was a hard sell. Definitely struggled with Shapiro's voice, which I thought was a weird knock-off of "high" literary styles while trying to express a "working-class"/outsider perspective. Didn't sound authentic to me, and today his poetry is pretty dated. Considering how much Shapiro raged against "boozhwah" pretention and class elitism in his otherwise breezy and bold book of essays Creative Glut (generally a good read), I found his old-school verse style frankly laughable. Shapiro rips social conservatives like Eliot, Yeats, and Pound, but writes in an antiquated style that I found off-putting from someone with low-brow, anti-elitist aspirations. The "Big Three" Modernist poets might have been crazy and into weird things like Fascism and Spiritualism and faeries, but fact is, they were just way better poets than Shapiro.

I also got tired of him jabbing his finger in the eye of "Old Money" every chance he got. Back when I was pouring booze down the throats of misbegotten Chicago businessmen for a living, I might have agreed with him, but it just got old. He taints some otherwise beautiful imagery by turning it into "social" poetry with an agenda that just sounds like reverse arrogance. Shapiro did a lot to counter the anti-Semitism in America in the 1940s and 50's, when the Jewish presence in American lit was still pretty marginalized, so I totally "get" some of his social distaste here, his skeptical glance into the seersuckered High Anglican world of Eliot and the racist quad of the University of Virginia where Shapiro went to school. But a lot of this poetry bears the stamp of its time, in a way that makes it sound threadbare and only historically interesting today.

[C. Varn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a best a book to begin exploring Shapiro as any, spanning his poetic career from the mid-1940s to the early 1990s. His early work seems very reminiscent of W. H. Auden's traditionalist or Robert Lowell's formalist periods, and Auden's influence definitely looms over the Shapiro's entire oeuvre. Shapiro's later work moved towards the more natural cadences of William Carlos Williams like much of the late modernists did in the 20th century, and while his work in the 1960s ran parallel to the Beat poets, he never was really one of them in content or spirit. His outsider relationship to the Southern US, his detached insight and concrete observation, and his relationship to the other confessional late modernists make him not quite an insider to any of his contemporary poetic movements but related to most of the major trends. While the middle section around the period of his work in the The Bourgeois Poet (1964), Shapiro does more clearly mimicked the ecstatic elements of the Beats and the long lines of Whitman, his detachment and outsider point of view maintains a uniqueness to his voice that keeps it from seeming to be subject to mere aesthetic trends. His later poems in this word return that laconic quality but in compressed free verse.

This is a great introduction to his work and a great addition to the American Poet's Line.

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm hit and miss with Shapiro's work. I'd never heard of him before, and read this volume over two plane rides and an afternoon.

I like his early stuff (Necropolis, Auto Wreck, Buick, A Cut Flower). Reading the poem Air Liner while in flight was particularly delightful. I bought the book after reading Manhole Covers, and that witty look at urban environments appealed to me very much.

His later stuff I found harder to appreciate. I found him so angry and bitter that it was difficult to get into some of his work. I particularly had trouble with his more misogynistic stuff. The prosody sections were interesting, and it was neat to see them alongside "standard" poetry formatting.

Ultimately, I'm not sure how to critique poetry - but some of this worked for me, and some of it didn't. I have three more volumes of the American Poets Project, and I'm looking forward to trying those.

[Carol · Rating 2 out of 5]

Karl Shapiro is an interesting and skilled poet. I've enjoyed his work in anthologies and in a few of his books. I was hopeful for this collection edited by John Updike. There were just too many poems that didn't hold up for me here. I will continue to look for the right Shapiro anthology--or maybe I'll just look for his poems in online anthology sites.

[Ambrose Miles · Rating 4 out of 5]

More than likely less than 4 stars, but not by much. I've started this book twice before. I don't know what to say why Shapiro's poetry did not "touch" me. It didn't, so there. I bought the book because it contained a tipped in page signed by John Updike.

[Wayne · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good survey of Shapiro’s poetry. Interesting to watch his themes, sensibilities, and forms develop over decades.

[John Adams · Rating 3 out of 5]

An engaging collection that introduces an interesting but occasionally frustrating 20th-century poet.

[Patricia N. McLaughlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shapiro’s carefully crafted poems are full of wit and wisdom about everyday subjects—Buicks, car wrecks, funerals, insects—and his reflections about war. His poems often evoke a hearty laugh, or a rueful sob, sometimes a sigh. Updike’s thoughtful introduction lauding the life and work of his long-time friend is well worth the read.

Favorite Poems:
“Necropolis”
“Buick”
“The Fly”
“The Bed”
“Essay on Rime”
“The Conscientious Objector”
“Bouquet”
“Aubade”
“Adult Bookstore”
“My Father’s Funeral”
“My Fame Is Not Feeling Well”
“At Auden’s Grave”
“Grant’s Tomb Revisited”
“Whitman”

[Eric Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

From 5 Stars to 3

I read a poem by Karl Shapiro in an anthology and really liked it, so I sought out his Library of America Poetry series volume. On sale for $5, what the heck? So I bought it.

His early poems are marvels, in my opinion, and made his reputation apparently. These poetically document such topics as, “Auto Wreck,” “Drug Store,” “Buick,” and “The Fly.” These and more really grabbed me.
The first third of this book mesmerized me enough so that I bought a copy for a friend—even at full price, I would have bought it.

I pressed on and found the middle third of the book less inspiring and a bit stilted. Perhaps that’s me though, not the poems.

As I finished the final third I had even less regard for those poems.

In the excellent Introduction, John Updike gives a clear accounting of Shapiro’s career and interests, and reveals some of the causes for the changes in the content of the poems over time.

In summary, my star grade: first third, 5 starts; second third, 4 stars; and final third, 3 stars. I’m glad I read it, strongly recommend it for those early poems, and at $5 it was a steal.