In Memory of Reading David Shapiro's In Memory of an Angel

Jon Curley extolls the virtues of David Shapiro's latest collection, In Memory of an Angel, at Hyperallergic. The collection, which City Lights published this year, "is his first full-length collection in fifteen years," Curley writes. "As in previous collections, he displays a lavish love of learning and language without blowsy extravagance." Let's begin there:

His giddy assault on conventions of poetry is delivered with gem-like sharpness. It is easy to get a contact high from the joyousness of his moving menageries, which are sometimes zany, often tender, and entice me to engage energetically with the names, subjects, and situations described in these poems. The reader frequently has to catch up with Shapiro as he generates, mutates, and recombines meanings. However, this hodgepodge of ideas, never humdrum, revises received notions of how objects and sentiments might be inventoried and understood.

In “A Note & Poem by Joseph Ceravolo in a Dream,” from Shapiro’s 1994 collection After a Lost Original, he writes of his late friend and fellow poet Ceravolo: “He is a possibilist poet.” This equally applies to his own art: Shapiro’s work invigorates the reader with its relentless desire to tease out so many possibilities of what seem gradually focused story-like musings that arc away from expected turns and conclusions. He is indeed by deed and words a “possibilist.” Amen! May that neologism become officially approved with acknowledgment to this poet under consideration.

Each poem accumulates and disperses subjects and insights in a performance that operates as both ars poetica and sensitivity restorer.

You'll have to read on from there and learn more at Hyperallergic.