 |
The Old Man
|
|
The day after his son died
all that day
grief was the good mother
as he lay in silence
in his bed on his side
knees drawn to chest
hand under cheek
eyes open.
Grief was the womb
his posture presupposed;
the absoluteness of it,
the encircling
wash of nothing
worse than this
can ever happen
made it soothing,
peaceful--it seemed
his every feature
was being bathed
away until
his face was like a face
before the least
expression scathes it,
his eyes the eyes
before the eyelids form,
fish eyes that do not
need to close now
not to see.
|
|
Writer
Bio
|
Alan Shapiro has written eight books of poems: After the Digging (Elpenor Books, 1981), The Courtesy (University of Chicago Press, 1983), Happy Hour (University of Chicago Press, 1987) which won the 1987 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Covenant (University of Chicago Press, 1991), Mixed Company(University of Chicago Press, 1996), winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award in poetry, The Dead Alive and Busy (University of Chicago Press, 2000), winner of the Kingsley Tufts prize, and Song and Dance, which Houghton Mifflin will be publishing in February, 2002. His Selected Poems was published last Spring by Carcanet Press in England. Shapiro is the author of three books of prose, In Praise of the Impure: Poetry and the Ethical Imagination (TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press, 1993), The Last Happy Occasion (Chicago, 1996), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle
Award in autobiography in 1997, and Vigil (Chicago, 1997), a memoir about his sister's death from breast cancer, and winner of the New England Booksellers Discovery Designation. The poetry editor of the Phoenix Poets Series at the University of Chicago Press from 1994 to 1995, and co-editor of Greek Tragedy in New Translation at Oxford University Press, Shapiro has just completed a translation of The Oresteia by Aeschylus, which Oxford will publish in 2002. Shapiro has received numerous awards and honors, including two awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, and most recently the O.B. Hardison Jr. Poetry Prize from the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C. He was also a 1991 recipient of a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writer's Award. Before coming to the University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill, Shapiro taught in the MFA Creative Writing program at UNC, Greensboro, and Northwestern University. From 1975 to 1979, he was a Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford University.
ashapiro@email.unc.edu
|
|
Other
Pedestal Published Works
|
|
| Click here to see books by this author |
|
|
