Selected Poems

This selection, published from 1981-1996 engaes with urgent issues of personal identity within the interlocking communities of a modern world and within history. The intimate bonds of family life are points of departure and return. Shapiro sees personal identity as mutable and multiple, a matrix of often conflicting cultural and linguistic histories that shape our desires. The style and language of his poems are necessariy mixed, by turns lyrical and narrative, slangy and elevated, analytical and visionary. They move between private and public, historical and mythic perspectives. Shapiro devises a language to accommodate the full range of is experience as a middle-class Jewish-American influenced at the same time by the Jewish Bible, Chirstian and Graeco-Roman literature, and by popular culture.