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Tantalus In Love Paperback – September 4, 2006
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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.
- Reading age2 - 4 years
- Print length88 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Dimensions5.5 x 0.24 x 8.5 inches
- Publication dateSeptember 4, 2006
- ISBN-100618773649
- ISBN-13978-0618773640
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"Poet Alan Shapiro again dazzles us with his linguistic layups." --Dannye Romine Powell Charlotte Observer —
About the Author
ALAN SHAPIRO is the William R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is a former recipient of the Kingsley Tufts Award and the Los Angeles Book Prize, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and is a fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Tantalus in Love
By Alan ShapiroMariner Books
Copyright © 2006 Alan ShapiroAll right reserved.
ISBN: 9780618773640
INVOCATION
Days pass and years vanish, and we sleep-
walk blind
among miracles. Love, fill our eyes
all up with seeing!
Let there be never again
a moment in which
your sudden shining isn't
sudden as it rends
the dark we walk in. Make us see
no matter where
we gaze that the bush burns
unconsumed.
And we, the spun clay, will rise
to a receding
holiness and sing, as it recedes,
How filled with awe
this place is, and we did not know it.
TANTA L U S I N L OVE
1
The trees let down
their branches to his out-
stretched hands,
lower
and still lower,
the branches
bending like a taut
bow from the weight of fruit
that flashes
everywhere
among the leaves, right there
beyond his fingers, at
his fingers, the dazzling
lusciousness
brushing
his fingertips so faintly
that there isn't any
difference
now between
a promised touch
and touch.
Are you? Is there someone?
The camera inside his head
doesn't want to get
involved,
will not take sides;
from high above them,
coolly
it pans away from him,
back curved like a question mark,
elbows on the table,
hands holding up his chin,
to her,
the very image
of resistance, deflection,
steely withdrawal as,
her chair pushed back, legs crossed,
arms folded on her chest,
her face not facing his,
she's looking out now through
the window at something that
he can't quite see from where
he's sitting,
unreadable,
but asking to be read—
as if
the fruit were reaching down
for him to feel it, take
it, hold it in his trembling
hand
How do you explain
though every time his hand strains
higher for it
What
the hell does this mean
it only springs back
higher up the branch
That's none of your
And don't you ever again
and all he has is air,
the prickling leaves,
her face
averted,
What do you want
from me?
a fragrance grown
so thick around him that
it's nearly visible,
a sweet vaporous twining
up and down his skin,
along his nose,
across
his parched, still opening mouth
Copyright © 2005 by Alan Shapiro. Reprinted by permission of Houghton
Mifflin Company.
Continues...
Excerpted from Tantalus in Loveby Alan Shapiro Copyright © 2006 by Alan Shapiro. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Product details
- Publisher : Ecco; Reprint edition (September 4, 2006)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 88 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0618773649
- ISBN-13 : 978-0618773640
- Reading age : 2 - 4 years
- Item Weight : 3.99 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.5 x 0.24 x 8.5 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,817,142 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #901 in Family Poetry (Books)
- #1,423 in Dysfunctional Families (Books)
- #1,796 in Family Activity
- Customer Reviews:
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- Reviewed in the United States on February 15, 2016Shapiro's poetry is always wonderfully image-filled and evocative, and I love that he often plays with ancient Greek mythological figures and stories.
- Reviewed in the United States on September 21, 2006I must confess, I'm not much of a fan of confessional style poetry. Yet, Shapiro has consistently, to my mind, produced great collections in this style. In Song and Dance, he grappled with those big issues of love, life, and death alongside the smaller ones of how to retain personal memories of a sibling, qualify his own coming of age, and ultimately deal with the grief that accompanied his loss. When I read it, I found it an excellent collection of poems.
So what of Tantalus in Love? Here Shapiro addresses the estrangement in his marriage, divorce, jealousy, and finally the possibility of finding love again and driving those old memories away. As a whole, it is ultimately a sort of quest that ends in his own personal redemption, with the demons of his past tragedies (loss of parents, siblings, and marriage) finally cast out.
Once again, Shapiro has produced a fine collection of poems that present a coherent whole while remaining enjoyable and powerful on their own.