The Wild Card: Selected Poems, Early and Late - Softcover

Coronation
The Alphabet
Amsterdam Whores
At Auden's Grave
Auto Wreck
Bad Taste, Inc.
Baudelaire In Iowa
Beautiful Thing
Bouquet
The Bourgeois Poet Closes The Door Of His Study And Lights His Pipe
Boy-man
Buick
Burlesk
California Winter
Calling The Child
The Child Who Is Silent
Christmas Eve: Australia
The Clearing
Clowning
The Conscientious Objector
Conscription Camp
The Contraband
The Convert
The Cracking-plant
Crossing Lincoln Park
A Curiosity
A Cut Flower
D.c.
Death Of Emma Goldman
The Dome Of Sunday
Drug Store
Elegy For A Dead Soldier
Elegy For Two Banjos
Emily Dickinson And Katherine Anne Porter
Emporium
Epitaph For John And Richard
Fame
The Figurehead
Fireworks
The First Time
The Fly
Fox Hole
Franklin
French Poetry
Full Moon: New Guinea
The Funeral Of Poetry
Future-present
Generations
Glad Hand
The Glutton
Going To School
The Gun
Hair
Haircut
High School
Homecoming
Hospital
Human Nature
The Humanities Building
I Am An Atheist Who Says His Prayers
In The Waxworks
The Intellectual
The Interlude
Israel
Israfel
Jazz
Jefferson
Jew
July 7, 1978
Lines For A Unitarian Church
The Living Rooms Of My Neighbors
Lord, I Have Seen Too Much
Magician
Manhole Covers
Messias
Midnight Show
The Minute
Mongolian Idiot
Moving In
Mozart's Jew
The Murder Of Moses
My Century
My Father's Funeral
The Nature Of Belief
Nebraska
Necropolis
Nostalgia
October 1
Office Love
The Old Horsefly
The Old Poet
Piano
The Piano Tuner's Wife
Poet
Poets' Corner
The Potomac
The Progress Of Faust
Randall Jarrell
Recapitulations
Red Indian
Roethke
Scyros
The Second-best Bed
Shylock
Solipsism
The Southerner
Sunday: New Guinea
The Synagogue
Tennyson
There Was That Roman Poet
Travelogue For Exiles
Troop Train
The Twins
University
V-letter
W.h.a.
Waitress
Washington Cathedral
Whitman
The Wood
You Call These Poems?
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

Shapiro's influential poems of the 1940s and '50s applied Audenesque techniques and his own metrical facility to then-contemporary, even shocking, subjects: Army life during WWII, when Shapiro served in the Pacific; "Auto Wreck" ("We are deranged, walking among the cops/ Who sweep glass and are large and composed"); a university where "To hurt the Negro and avoid the Jew/ Is the curriculum"; and a soda-fountain "Drug Store" where "the attractive symbols/ Watch over puberty and leer." More than half of this selection draws on those poems, including the Pulitzer-winning V-Letter (1944) and the meditations on American Jewish identity that culminated in Poems of a Jew (1958). The half autobiographical prose-poem series The Bourgeois Poet (1964)?well represented here?gave Shapiro his most individual, most aggressive style, one part Whitman, three parts Philip Roth: "The kitchens of my neighbors are like cars: what gleaming dials, what toothy enamels, engines that click and purr, idling the hours away." Early and late, the poems dwell on social meanings, groups, and types ("The Southerner," "The Conscientious Objector," "The Old Guard") judging and challenging whatever Shapiro views as orthodoxy. The appealingly unceremonious latest poems declare Shapiro's love for his wife, or commemorate poets from Auden to Mozart's librettist Da Ponte. If Shapiro no longer seems as imposing a poetic presence as he once did (though the prefaces help us reimagine his heyday), this selection reminds us that he has for decades thought and felt honestly about poetry, history, society and family, and is a rewarding sampling of the work that thought has produced.
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