Tantalus in Love
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Kingsley Tufts Award winner Alan Shapiro is at his most passionate in this new collection full of life, jealousy, lust, and romantic abandon.
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Tantalus in Love begins with the disintegration of a marriage, with anger and suspicion. But from sorrow Shapiro moves to celebrate the resilience of love after loss, and the awakening glory of an amorous middle age. In "Invocation" he writes, "Love . . . let there be never again / a moment in which / your sudden shining isn't / sudden." These poems yearn with hesitant love, heated at renewal, fragile but intensified by past experience of love's evanescence and uncertainty. "Iris / love flower of the middle-aged . . . the stalk / bends under the unexpected weight . . . how did I ever live without you?" Tantalus in Love reinvents myth and symbol in lyrical portraits of astounding resonance, illuminating this defining vulnerability of humanity.
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