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- The Sights Along the Harbor
The comprehensive collection of a master of the American modern form
Direct, informal, and richly evocative of his Jewish heritage and New York City home, Harvey Shapiro's poetry has occupied a unique place in American letters for over 50 years. This new collection brings together his latest work and much of his 11 previous collections, revealing the full arc of his carefully calibrated poetics. Shapiro engages themes including the immigrant experience, urban landmarks and lifestyles, family life, and war. The reader will see the more formal British-tinged cadences of his earlier work give way to the colloquial, personal nature of his later poems, and how Shapiro's candor and simplicity mark his work throughout the last five decades. Bringing the city and its balance of despair and exuberance into stark relief, this poetry is intimately attuned both to life's quiet disappointments and to its unanticipated miracles.
Author's Note
Acknowledgments
New Poems
Desk
To Nature
Cathedral
In Japan
In a Bad Time
The Librarian
Requiem
Rain on Scuttle Hole Road
Bus Ride
The News
God Poem
Commentary
According to the Rabbis
The Generations
Adam
In Athens
Brooklyn Walk
Reading Outdoors
Kuanon
Five Days in Paris
Night in the Hamptons
Chance Meeting
Train Trip
Jump Ship
One Day
From an Autobiography
Telling the Muse What It's Like After 70
Sky
Payback Time
His Story
For Gabriel Preil
Madonna Does Kabbalah
Seriously
On the Street
The Need
This World, That World
Colors
Landscape
The Uses of Poetry
Explaining It
Nights
At the Seminar
The Old Poet Sums Up
The Sun's Clear Light
From The Eye, 1953
Seascape
The Heart
Around One Cellini Saltcellar
The Eye, The Pulse
On a Line by Lawrence
Summer
December
Another Old Song
Enters Light
Power in America
Death of a Grandmother
From Mountain, Fire, Thornbush, 1961
The Destructive Will
The Prophet Announces
Lines for the Ancient Scribes
Adoration of the Moon
The Talker
The Marriage
The Book
Exodus
Pharos
Aleph
The Rough Proof
Another Reading
A Short History
Mountain, Fire, Thornbush
Feast of the Ram's Horn
From a Sermon on the Five Afflictions
Spirit of Rabbi Nachman
From Battle Report, 1966
News of the World
Monday
Rites
The Collectors
Sunday Morning
Past Time
How Many Times
The Injunction
Three Days
His Life
Forces
For Job at Forty
What the Witch Said
The Service
Decisions
These Lives
Beyond the Demonic Element
A Writer
Captain
For David
ABC of Culture
The Night
They
Dumb Adam
Master and Teacher
The Six Hundred Thousand Letters
Purities
Hidden
The Old Nostalgia
National Cold Storage Company
Battle Report
From This World, 1971
For WCW
Days and Nights
The Lesson
The Light is Sown
By the Women's House of Detention
Glory
Recapitulations
Minute Biography
American Words
Dear Wife
As I Come Home
First Snow
Facing a Wall
Working It Out
Sister
To My Father
Spaces
To the Teacher
From Martin Buber
The Synagogue on Kane Street
Riverside Drive
Ditty
The Way
Where I Am Now
Kabbalah
A Message from Rabbi Nachman
Lines for Erwin R. Goodenough (1893 – 1996)
The Kingdom
Cross Country
Field Mice
Hello There!
Definitions of Poetry
On Some Words of Ben Azzai
Sayings of the Fathers
A History
"The Way Things Are"
How the News Reached Me
Thanks and Praise
Tractors
The Argument
All Right, Dogen
It Is
For Delmore Schwartz
From Lauds & Nightsounds, 1978
Through the Boroughs
Notes at 46
Riding Westward
For the Yiddish Singers in the Lakewood Hotels of My Childhood
In Brooklyn Harbor
"Jesus, Mary I Love You Save Souls"
For the Sparrows on New Year's Morning
Distances
True
Saul's Progress
Bringing Up Kids
Veteran
Every Day
Muse Poem
In the Room
Arriving
Montauk Highway  • A Notebook
In Our Day
How Differences Arise
Janis
Adaptation of a First-Grade Composition
In Fear of Failure
For the Year's End
City Portrait
A Gift
Like a Beach
August
Musical Shuttle
Tight Like That
The Bridge
Incident
47th Street
In the Synagogue
Brooklyn Gardens
Nightsounds
Domestic Matters
Cry of the Small Rabbits
For the Zen Master Skateboarding Down Independence Pass
Muffdiving on the Upper West Side
O Seasons
Ancient Days
1976
Portrait
Poets & Comics
The Realization
The Old Wife Speaks
Vacation Poetry
After Dark
Lines
The Intensity
Happiness in Downtown Brooklyn
From a Chinese Master
Ditch Plain Poem
From The Light Holds, 1984
Things Seen
From the Greek Anthology
The Twig
July
May 14, 1978
City
The Card
The Wish
Middle Class
Learning
San Francisco
Summer and Back
On a Sunday
Discovery
Cummings
Sons
Autobiography
Years Ago
Movie
Around Town
Brooklyn Heights
Winter Sun
Bad News
A Memorial
Blue Eyes
Interlude
At the Shore
How It Is with Me
Getting Through the Day
Battlements
For William Dunbar and His Lament
Memento Mori
Considering
Cityscape
The End
Experiences
A Jerusalem Notebook
Song
From National Cold Storage Company, 1988
History
Observations
Two Cornell Deaths
From an Autobiography
Comment
Autobiography
Curtains
Last Things
Cynthia
Combat
Italy, 1944
From A Day's Portion, 1994
These Are the Streets
Celebrations
Questions
New York Summer
Meditation on a Brooklyn Bench
City Ethic
Hollywood Note
Brooklyn Heights
Brooklyn Nights
Fact
Lessons
August, from Brooklyn
Lower East Side
Lit Crit
On Writing
Sunday School
Bible Lesson
Genesis
After the Fall
For Paul Celan and Primo Levi
Tonight
Loyalty
Snapshot
Assimilation
Natural History
Jerusalem
Bronx Elegy
A Tel Aviv Notebook
Aubade
His Age
Table Scene
History
The Encounter
Politics
Pleasure
Another Story
Belief Systems
Education
A Story
Fancy
How It Ended
When the Spirit
Before Sleep
On My Portrait by Rose Graubart
Ocean Dawn
The Text
For Charles Reznikoff
Saroyan
A Day
Tranquility
1943
Blowing Smoke
Iggy
Self-Portrait
The Boast
Years Ago
Shoppers
A Day's Portion
The Defense
From Selected Poems, 1997
What It Feels Like
In Tiberias
Epitaph
Prague
1949
Choices
Hart
Generations
The Ticket
Italy, 1996
Traveling Through Ireland
From How Charlie Shavers Died and Other Poems, 2001
Brooklyn Snaps
New York Notes
Three Flights Down the Stairs
Manhattan in Summer
Movie Life
Brooklyn Promenade
Family
War Stories
1998
History
How Charlie Shavers Died
6/20/97
At the Tomb of the Poet Rachel
Oppen
Homage to George Oppen
East Hampton Reading
John Clare
For Armand and David
Small Commentaries
In the '50s
Working Days
Greenwich Village, 1999
American Poet
Places
Cape Ann
Abraham's Path
Part of an Infinite Series
For Galen & After O'Hara
Visiting Japan
Mercy
Tourist in Africa
Israel
Hebrew Melodies
Jerusalem, For Example
It Seems to Me
Confessions of Age
1930s
Through the Rain
Observations
Last Night's Jazz
Three Epitaphs
Heirloom
Confusion at the Wheel
Brooklyn
East End
Index
Harvey Shapiro's many books include How Charlie Shavers Died and Other Poems (2001) and National Cold Storage Company (1988). He published his first book in 1953, and has taught at Cornell University, Bard College, Columbia University, and Yale University. In his career as a journalist, he has served as editor of the New York Times Book Review and senior editor of the New York Times Magazine. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
"[Harvey Shapiro is] a veritable dynamo and a venerable American original whose small poems at their tonic best are as large as life."
~New York Times Book Review
""The book is quite simply a stunning achievement. I know that I will turn to it again and again for its wit, its depth, its intellectual adventurousness, and the exultant play of its language.""
~Southhampton Press
""Shapiro has established himself as a hidden treasure in a city of otherness.... Whether at JFK, Ben-Gurion airport or at his desk in East Hampton, where statues of a Buddha and a goddess of creativity are perched, Shapiro is poised to soar with pen and powers of observation in hand.""
~The Jerusalem Report
""[Harvey Shapiro is] a veritable dynamo and a venerable American original whose small poems at their tonic best are as large as life.""
~New York Times Book Review
""Few modern poets can match the range of experience that Shapiro records with a classical sanity and clarity. Giving a reader so much in return for such little effort risks underestimation. I'm confident that posterity won't make this mistake...""
~The Forward
"What Shapiro can do with the first-person, anecdotal mode is close kin to a jazz master's version of an old standard. This gathering, warm and alive, is a national treasure.""
~Norman Finkelstein, author of Not One of Them in Place
"What Shapiro can do with the first-person, anecdotal mode is close kin to a jazz master's version of an old standard. This gathering, warm and alive, is a national treasure."
~Norman Finkelstein, author of Not One of Them in Place
"Harvey Shapiro has written his great long poem in small increments, poem by poem, detail by radiant detail. Brought together they make a book of life, where love and war, memory and fantasy, landscape and ancient text coexist and reflect on one another. A master equally of aphorism and Imagist snapshot and savage one-liner, Shapiro is also a storyteller whose perspectives are epic even when his form is brief.""
~Geoffrey O'Brien, author of The Browser's Ecstasy