Mixed Company (Phoenix Poets)
A poetry collection built from family, marriage, and childhood memory. It explores intimacy and social distance in a voice that is delicate, controlled, and precise.
Work Information
Private memory becomes a way to reconsider the shape of relationships.
This poetry collection gathers the small details of intimate life into a study of family and marriage. Using personal experience as material, it carefully follows the instability and persistence of feeling.
Book Information
- Publisher
- University of Chicago Press
- Published
- 1996-03-01
- Pages
- 94 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 15.88 x 1.02 x 21.59 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780226750316
- ISBN-10
- 0226750310
- Price
- 4879 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Poetry/American
Respected poet, teacher, and critic Alan Shapiro continues his much-acclaimed explorations of childhood, family, and marriage in Mixed Company . Revealing a world troubled by difference while struggling toward commonality, and with equal attention to historical detail and the poetics of everyday life, from the mythic past to the abrasive intimacies of the present, Shapiro charts the many ways our social and sexual identities are formed, threatened, altered, and, for good or ill, preserved. Deeply felt and ambitious, Mixed Company is an extraordinary book by one of the leading poets writing in America today. "What draws us into Alan Shapiro's Mixed Company is not a conspicuous felicity or any sort of bravura, but the quiet, undaunted way he goes after the truth of human feeling and motive. . . . The poems grope and conjecture, looking for understanding . . . but whatever may remain unsolved and insoluble, the poems are full of astonishing insights, a rare articulateness, and what another age called 'knowledge of the human heart.'" —Richard Wilbur
Alan Shapiro teaches poetry and creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of a collection of essays, In Praise of the Impure: Poetry and the Ethical Imagination (1993), and four previous books of poetry, including the award-winning Happy Hour (1987).
Reviews
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Poetic snapshots of American life
Shapiro's narrative poetry places snapshots of American life on the page. The poems in this collection range from childhood scenes, where the narrator is observing grownups, to experiences where the narrator is an adult. He makes effective use of cultural and historical events to anchor his poems in time context. In "My Mother and a Few Friends," the young narrator is observing the grownups. We know it is the 1950s or 60s because they are all smoking, and the smoking is matter-of-fact, a normal part of their everyday life. The women keep on talking, and I watch and watch, and all I make out clearly is the cigarette now one and now another hand is waving into strands of smoke that tangle and run together whenever anybody speaks; Shapiro writes about his wife in labor, and about her singing to their newborn daughter. in a voice made tentative with gladness still too new to trust, more brave than beautiful, she sang your name, ( Isabel) There are poems which, in retrospect, recognize the eventual demise of his marriage. Many of the poems are long, running more than 2 pages. Shapiro doesn't hesitate to address dark situations and emotions. In "Sylvia," one of the most poignant poems in the collection, he writes of a friend who died by suicide, and his discomfort at listening to her complain over and over. You must have seen that last time how I shifted, how frankly by then I glanced away, blamed you for having left me no polite way out. "Girlfriend" is delightful until the abrupt twist at the end, where the reader cringes in empathy for the teenage boy after his first sexual experience. It was then I heard you in the next room on the phone, that giggling whisper to your friend, that girlish tune of scorn 3 of the final poems deal with 1960s racial tension. The black girl next to me was cheering under her breath As the two girls, white and black, appeared to freeze Together for a moment with their hands locked in each other' s hair before they toppled over (The Fight, 1969) Shapiro is a master of narrative. He skillfully captures details and nuances of relationships. I found Mixed Company interesting, with a few excellent poems, but I much preferred Song and Dance.