Alan Shapiro

A nominee for the 1987 National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry, this new collection contains poems that use their calm surfaces to restrain difficult and unshapely material. The longer poems, narratives of considerable power, display a generosity of detail and insight and seem more like versified short stories than poems. The character studies like "Extra," "Anatomy Lesson," and the title poem recall the bitterness in similar poems by Randall Jarrell or Anthony Hecht. The chilling poem "Neighbors" tells the story of a young couple, whose downstairs neighbor, a crone who sings old love songs, becomes a crazed menace.

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