From Let Me Hear You

 

Outside is inside now.

The pyramid whose point

we are is weightless

and invisible

and has become itself the night

in which alone

together

on a high plateau

we go on shouting

out whatever name

those winds keep blowing back

into the mouth that’s shouting it.

 

Alan Shapiro’s newest book of poetry is situated at the intersection between private and public history, as well as individual life and the collective life of middle-class America in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Whether writing about an aged and dying parent or remembering incidents from childhood and adolescence, Shapiro attends to the world in ways that are as deeply personal as they are recognizable and freshly social—both timeless and utterly of this particular moment.