Alan Shapiro
Night of the Republic
Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt, 2012
ISBN: 978-0547329703
Pages: 80
Reviewed by: Amy Glynn Greacen
Night of the Republic – Alan Shapiro
There’s a trick in much of Alan Shapiro’s poetry, a mode of diction or syntax or a logos, that has the effect of a Mobius band. Sentences take you in circles that somehow, despite being circles, keep twisting, pushing and pulling you in different directions even as you follow the path of his phrases. There is a constant chase of memory and forgetting, and forgettability, the observed and the ignored, the great “except for” that haunts the (largely) small scenes in Shapiro’s new collection, Night of the Republic.
Readers of Shapiro’s previous books will recognize some of his signature preoccupations in this one – you know, the Poet Stuff. Love. Loss. Mortality. Time. (and Pee. This guy sees more in a men’s room than some of us see in the Vatican Museum.) What’s a little different about this collection is the way he has seriously upped the ante with regard to the presence of Absence. No love songs here, no second-person epistolary reflection – very few characters at all. Section One is a series of landscapes, generally man-made, generic, suburban, mundane – and empty. These poems look at the life of human places when the humans aren’t looking. The closed-for-the-night shoe store, the gas station john, the dry cleaner, the hospital exam room: places where you can hear the desolate buzz of the failing fluorescent lighting tube, the tick of some ungodly clock. Even his outdoor settings (park bench, playground) are examined in their abandoned moments – even memory seems to have abandoned them, except perhaps for his own, as in the poem “Park Bench:”
Behind the bench the drive,
before the bench the river.
Behind the bench, white lights
approaching east and west
become red lights
receding east and west
while before the bench,
there are paved and unpaved
pathways and a grassy field,
the boathouse, and the playground, and the gardens
of a park named for a man whom
no one now remembers
except in the forgetting that occurs
whenever the park’s name is said….
Do you see what I mean, the gyre thing? Mobius strip? Coriolis effect? I’m not sure what to call it but you get it, sitting on that bench – or looking at it; I don’t think even the speaker is sitting there – a tumbling outward and inward of Things with, at the same time, a life of their own, and a total anonymity (I get an image of the bank of the Charles River, reading this, but have no idea where we actually are. It’s somewhere. And it doesn’t matter where.) Loops and twists infiltrate everything in this world: the nasty revolving towel in “Gas Station Restroom.” The “shadowless shadow / play of hands and legs/ up and down along the poles, / and the hands retreating from the money, / and the hands in pockets dreaming, / or dreaming later on a another body” in “Downtown Strip Club.” (Technically, that poem is peopled. But note the interchangeability, the particularly desolate designed anonymity, of that space.) It’s maximized in poems such as “Funeral Home,” which spools itself out in a single sentence, clause tumbling over clause, the eye drawn to the detail that opens from the observation of another detail, ad infinitum: only a “roped-off staircase” prevents us from seeing the empty funeral home as “a mansion / where no one lives.” Ha ha: A home where no one lives. It goes on; the dry cleaner’s conveyor rack, the ellipse of a racetrack – even the elliptical machines (ha ha!) in the empty gym.
But they’re never just circles. You come back to where you started – but you don’t. Everything goes upside down and over and over itself in the transit. And they are, in the other sense of it, Elliptical Machines. They signify by way of what they leave out.
It works among and between, as well as within the poems: Section One’s “Gas Station Restroom” transmutes the ping and blear and dirt into “Paul / becoming Saul / becoming scents,” and then inverts it in “Edenic Smile,” where a solitary innocence turns to abashed self-awareness in a restaurant men’s room.
Shapiro takes on many, many subjects in this book, from the tiny to the gigantic, but the throughlines are consistent, and satisfying. These poems are a kind of encyclopedia of humanness, despite – or more likely because of – the conspicuous absence of individual humans – a conspicuousness that a more pastorally inclined poet would never pull off. Somnambulism and dreaming, emptiness, what we notice and don’t, what we attend to and don’t, what we do to enable ourselves to be “normal” in the face of what is waiting for us; age, infirmity, humiliation, indifference, helplessness, darkness. Every inanimate object in this book implies the hand of its maker. In keeping with the twisting, circling, tumbled nature of the ideas he presents, Shapiro generally abandons stanza (until the final section of the book, where the poems share the single form of unrhymed triplets in somewhat sprung pentameter) in favor of uninterrupted chains of mostly short lines, beautifully enjambed to create long, complicated sentences. Shapiro’s sense of prosody is so quick on its feet that it feels like pure instinct, and even in poems where you reach the end of the sentence and find yourself going back to the beginning of it to retrieve the subject, it’s exactly what you should do. He is one of those masters of repetition who can make the same word mean seven different things within the space of five lines. He knows when doing this will hold the reader in suspension and when it will hurtle them forward.
The final section’s triplets are an interesting formal move, taking up a number of seemingly small moments, which, as in the earlier sections, unravel into big, very big things. Childhood recollections; a fever, staring at clothes agitating in the dryer, or a cup of cold coffee, or cigarette smoke or a dripping faucet (Coriolis Effect? Meet Butterfly Effect. Hi there). Small, contained – formalized. Yet they echo, cavernously, against the earlier sections, and the way so many of them appear to be from a young person’s perspective makes them seem at first to be more, what, innocent: small moments that perhaps cut those themes of mortality and entropy and the abandoned and broken and the endlessly, incomprehensibly expanding universe down to size. Yeah, right: like one of those Greek plays with a happy ending you totally didn’t see coming. Ahem. Putting those things in the containment unit of a stanza and making them the fallible recollections of a younger self makes them even more ominous, more inevitable, more eternal. Here’s a portion of the poem “Dryer:”
I watched geologies of color, deep time
Of mountain ranges rising from a sea
They just as quickly sank into again;
Pangaea breaking into continents,
Continents into islands, and the islands
Into that reef of blue cuff green peninsula
Of pant leg, flashing up and driven down,
Churning itself upon itself, in cycles
Neither different nor the same, over
And over for five billion years until
The bell rang as the drum stopped, and it all
Fell past the porthole into what it was.
You hear echoes here, of the middle of the book, the “Formation of the Galaxy” section, and even the palsied hands of the old woman recollecting the War in “Forgiveness,” the fingers (and the story) struggling to move in two directions at once. Similarly, “Funeral Home” is re-evoked in the lines of “Family Pictures,” where portraits of dead relatives collect on the walls of a sitting room whose sofas are covered in plastic, silver under felt in a drawer, and the speaker imagines “Seeing myself / Up there among them keeping a close eye too/ On everybody coming after me / who needed constantly to be reminded / that nothing in the living room was theirs.” Eeep! You want to go back over and over to count the number of things this dead “living” room keeps covered up – it’s everything but the actual dead.
Or, take the beginning of “Light Switch:”
The bad news was the sun was mortal too.
One day it would just burn out. The good news was
We’d all be long gone by the time it happened.
The good news was there wasn’t any place
Inside the house I couldn’t find extinctions
To study and by studying prepare
Myself for what I wouldn’t live to see:…
Every section of this book brims with these moments of being jarred out of a dream you didn’t realize you were even having; mortality lit from every facet imaginable. Shapiro’s an alchemist, someone who can turn anything into anything – and he does it without being a showoff. No baroque formal explosions, no I Am Erudition, Hear Me Roar. What these poems contain instead is a startling generosity, given the book’s themes. He treats the fragile, broken, teetering world with a keenness and depth of observation that makes stinginess impossible and ironic distance irrelevant. These are plain-language pieces that magically deepen and stretch as you read; evocative, formally acute and exceedingly subtle. Shapiro can be grim without cynicism, woeful without hopelessness, cataclysmic without dourness (indeed, there’s frequently the specter of a chuckle in cataclysm’s face). The good news, and the bad news, generally, are the same news. We all know it. Shapiro just says it better than most of us could.
I could go on. You could be dealing with me picking out line after line to rhapsodize over a comma or the way a certain phrase inverts itself like a surprise plot twist in an unusually well-scripted action film. For pages. And pages. I shall resist the temptation. I’ll leave you with just this: Night of the Republic is simply the work of a great poet at the top of his game. Read this book.
And I’ll sign off with what might arguably be a gravitational center (pun very much intended) of the collection, “Formation of the Galaxy,” in which the speaker is reading an article on dark matter in a noisy bar:
“The writer of the article describes dark matter as a black canvas on which the
visible universe is painted. If that figure captures best the relationship of gloom to glitter, couldn’t the canvas also be the painter, the unseen the conjuror of the seen, as if the ten percent that doesn’t hide were being imagined by the ninety percent that does?”
From where I sit: uh, yeah. It sure looks as though it could.
Alan Shapiro has published eleven books of poetry, most recently Old War, winner of
the 2009 Ambassador Book Award. Winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award, Los Angeles Time Book Award, and twice a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle, he has also published two translations (The Orestia and The Trojan Women), three books of prose, The Last Happy Occasion, Vigil, and In Praise of the Impure. His first novel, Broadway Baby, will appear in 2011.
Shapiro has received fellowships and awards from The Guggenheim Foundation, the NEA, The American Academy of Arts and Letters, the
Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Foundation and many others. A fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Shapiro is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina, and also teaches in the Warren Wilson low residency MFA program.
