Formal Wear
Out on the lawn,the party has goneon since longbefore anyoneremembers. The silksuits, black ties,the satin eveninggowns have all grownweary of the partylights that, woventhrough deck railing,begin to falterflickering offand on in a littlecat and mousegame between houseand night that night,driven back each timea little less,is winning. In-seam and pleat,sleeve, yoke, slitplacket and ventare sick of the dampshapes they wear,the suave rustlingthat blunt bodiesape overthe darkening lawn—even the laciest, thelight as fragrance,sheer as air, isdreaming nowonly of wirehangers pingingin empty closetsunder basement stairs—and as they dream they sagto the tips of grassthat curl like tonguesunder hemand cuff to lickthem as they pass.
Feature Date
- November 4, 2023
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“Formal Wear” from BY AND BY: by Alan Shapiro.
Published by The Waywiser Press on October 5th, 2023.
Copyright © 2023 by Alan Shapiro.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Alan Shapiro was born in Boston Massachusetts in 1952. He received his BA from Brandeis University, and taught for the last 25 years at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Recipient of numerous awards and honors, he has published many books of poetry, including, most recently, Proceed to Check Out, Against Translation, Reel to Reel (finalist for the Pulitzer Prize) and Night of the Republic (finalist for both the National Book Award and the International Griffin Prize). He has also published several books of critical essays, a novel (Broadway Baby), and translations of Greek tragedy.
"Alan Shapiro has written some of the most piercing anti-elegiac elegies of our time. He’s addressed social issues with a rare linguistic inventiveness that makes him a citizen of the world of language, free of cant, attitudinizing, or moral hand wringing. The recursive nature of his syntax can capture every self-contradictory flicker of consciousness as it grapples with how love turns to lovelessness, and how we connive at our own misfortunes even as we suffer them. In his new book, By and By, however dark his subject matter might seem—extinction of self and species, the inevitable hypocrisies and double-binds of mismatched lovers, the fact of age and aging as a moment by moment process of physical debilitation and slow disappearance from the world—the utter joyousness that he takes in every line he writes makes every poem feel like a triumph of poetic consciousness. But it’s not so much a triumph over anything, as it is a sense of being continuous with everything. In poem after poem, his language finds unique ways to dignify and uplift whatever his imagination lights on. There is nothing too small or too large for the radical inclusiveness of his attention."
— Tom Sleigh, author of The King’s Touch
"Alan Shapiro’s By and By is an absolute stunner, from one of the finest poets in America. It journeys through an underworld of memory, as our hero sings of the past with wit, and sympathy, and fierce intelligence—whether he meets the shade of a beloved friend, or a former lover, or a childhood family so long dead the poet’s ‘thought is all that’s left of them.’ In poem after poem Shapiro’s daring, high-wire sentences lead us out past lament and praise, out past any irritable reaching after fact, to dwell on mortality, and how it feels to live inside ‘the mind, calling and calling from the cliff it is, in the night it is.’ Read these poems to glimpse the afterlife that awaits us all ‘inside [a] phone, hanging by a thread of soon to be deleted texts.’ Read them to hear just how urgent and powerful lyric poetry can be in the 21st century."
— Patrick Phillips, author of Song of the Closing Doors and Elegy for a Broken Machine
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