By and By
£10.99
The poems in By and By are both painfully intimate and otherworldly, enmeshed in contemporary culture and personal life, even while they view that life, that culture with an outraged, affectionate detachment born of a big picture sense of political and literary history. By turns funny and broken hearted, ironic and troubled, with idiomatic exactness and formal range, Shapiro explores the vagaries of a globalized world that complicates, if not destroys, the connections that it claims to serve.
By and By
Alan Shapiro has written some of the most piercing anti-elegiac elegies of our time. He’s addressed social issues with a rare linguistic inventiveness that makes him a citizen of the world of language, free of cant, attitudinizing, or moral hand wringing. The recursive nature of his syntax can capture every self-contradictory flicker of consciousness as it grapples with how love turns to lovelessness, and how we connive at our own misfortunes even as we suffer them. In his new book, By and By, however dark his subject matter might seem—extinction of self and species, the inevitable hypocrisies and double-binds of mismatched lovers, the fact of age and aging as a moment by moment process of physical debilitation and slow disappearance from the world—the utter joyousness that he takes in every line he writes makes every poem feel like a triumph of poetic consciousness. But it’s not so much a triumph over anything, as it is a sense of being continuous with everything. In poem after poem, his language finds unique ways to dignify and uplift whatever his imagination lights on. There is nothing too small or too large for the radical inclusiveness of his attention.
— Tom Sleigh, author of The King’s Touch
Alan Shapiro’s By and By is an absolute stunner, from one of the finest poets in America. It journeys through an underworld of memory, as our hero sings of the past with wit, and sympathy, and fierce intelligence—whether he meets the shade of a beloved friend, or a former lover, or a childhood family so long dead the poet’s ‘thought is all that’s left of them.’ In poem after poem Shapiro’s daring, high-wire sentences lead us out past lament and praise, out past any irritable reaching after fact, to dwell on mortality, and how it feels to live inside ‘the mind, calling and calling from the cliff it is, in the night it is.’ Read these poems to glimpse the afterlife that awaits us all ‘inside [a] phone, hanging by a thread of soon to be deleted texts.’ Read them to hear just how urgent and powerful lyric poetry can be in the 21st century.
— Patrick Phillips, author of Song of the Closing Doors and Elegy for a Broken Machine
Reviews of By and By
Shepherd: Explore, Discover, Read (November 2023)
One of Robert Pinsky’s 3 Favorite Reads in 2023, about which he writes:
At first, Alan Shapiro’s brilliant book By And By scared me a little with its persistent subject, the varieties of woe — from minor to major, from ludicrous inconvenience to mortality itself. But in fact, the book cheered me up and engaged me in its actual, central emotion, not woe but wonder: astonishment that this, too, whatever it is, can be a part of a poem, part of life. He loves understanding: the transforming, unquenchable work of imagination.
Two poems from Alan Shapiro’s By and By
Flying Eastward from My Brother’s Funeral
When we reached cruising altitude and the seat belt sign went off, a child, a little girl, went running up and down the aisle pointing to the windows as she shouted, It’s flying out there, everything out there is flying!
and she was right, the flying was all outside, out among the clouds that passed us while inside everything was still—except for the girl—inside was where you sat, or walked, or ran, as though on just another kind of ground.
And when we flew through time zones later than the ones we left, I notice how the blue sky even as we were flying through it was always somewhere else, even at an altitude of 40,000 feet, was just as far away as on the ground; it was still just air to be seen through to the blue it turned into without my seeing how.
And, frightening me even more, when I looked down it seemed as if the land, and the scattered clouds below us, not us, were moving, while we hung helplessly in place, in a kind of limbo, watching them slide under the plane, at a snail’s pace, in the opposite direction, in a continuous inch by inch right to left procession, as if all motion could only now be westward, back behind us where we started from, what’s “present yet unto my memory,”
before the black suits came, after the last breath, the way the lit up empty stadium out the bedroom window radiated a dull corona paling up into a sky so black I couldn’t tell if it was late or early, and then a plane flew over it descending in my direction
and I’m thinking now if someone had been looking out the plane window down at the accelerating street lights hurrying eastward, faster and faster, just as the landing gear rumbled opened and braced for impact, he would have seen my dim lit vigil rising toward him and then rush away beneath him before the plane touched down.
Alan Shapiro
The Walkers
Whenever a chill
out of nowhere
on a warm day
made you shiver,
an elder would say
someone must have just
then walked on your grave.
Who the walker was
or how the scuff
of heel or toe
on grass through packed
earth could have passed
a phantom shudder
from a dead body
to a live one,
or how a body
could be both at once,
both here and now
and there too
in a future where you
were you no longer,
no one could say.
What wasn’t said
became a bedtime
riddle the dark
would riddle me
uneasily
to sleep with,
how the ghost chill
through the worm
hole of the not yet
but still somehow
already dead me
wormed through me
when the walker passed,
and how the walker
too would have been
shivering from another
walker who also
would have shivered, on
and on, all through
the planetary network
of a cryptic
signaling that every
goose bump, tip
of nerve end
shuddering for no
other reason
couldn’t help but
receive and send.
Alan Shapiro
Excerpts
Two poems from Alan Shapiro's By and By
Flying Eastward from My Brother’s Funeral
When we reached cruising altitude and the seat belt sign went off, a child, a little girl, went running up and down the aisle pointing to the windows as she shouted, It’s flying out there, everything out there is flying!
and she was right, the flying was all outside, out among the clouds that passed us while inside everything was still—except for the girl—inside was where you sat, or walked, or ran, as though on just another kind of ground.
And when we flew through time zones later than the ones we left, I notice how the blue sky even as we were flying through it was always somewhere else, even at an altitude of 40,000 feet, was just as far away as on the ground; it was still just air to be seen through to the blue it turned into without my seeing how.
And, frightening me even more, when I looked down it seemed as if the land, and the scattered clouds below us, not us, were moving, while we hung helplessly in place, in a kind of limbo, watching them slide under the plane, at a snail’s pace, in the opposite direction, in a continuous inch by inch right to left procession, as if all motion could only now be westward, back behind us where we started from, what’s “present yet unto my memory,”
before the black suits came, after the last breath, the way the lit up empty stadium out the bedroom window radiated a dull corona paling up into a sky so black I couldn’t tell if it was late or early, and then a plane flew over it descending in my direction
and I’m thinking now if someone had been looking out the plane window down at the accelerating street lights hurrying eastward, faster and faster, just as the landing gear rumbled opened and braced for impact, he would have seen my dim lit vigil rising toward him and then rush away beneath him before the plane touched down.
Alan Shapiro
The Walkers
Whenever a chill
out of nowhere
on a warm day
made you shiver,
an elder would say
someone must have just
then walked on your grave.
Who the walker was
or how the scuff
of heel or toe
on grass through packed
earth could have passed
a phantom shudder
from a dead body
to a live one,
or how a body
could be both at once,
both here and now
and there too
in a future where you
were you no longer,
no one could say.
What wasn’t said
became a bedtime
riddle the dark
would riddle me
uneasily
to sleep with,
how the ghost chill
through the worm
hole of the not yet
but still somehow
already dead me
wormed through me
when the walker passed,
and how the walker
too would have been
shivering from another
walker who also
would have shivered, on
and on, all through
the planetary network
of a cryptic
signaling that every
goose bump, tip
of nerve end
shuddering for no
other reason
couldn’t help but
receive and send.
Alan Shapiro
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