eBook How Charlie Shavers Died and Other Poems (Wesleyan Poetry Series) ePub

I enjoyed this slim work because it epitomizes for me both the America I know and the America I imagine.

The language is terse regardless of the length of the individual poems.

excellent service and product

I was quite disappointed in the book...too much reliance on f-word and other smutty language. Read some, scanned other poems, and then threw the book into the garbage. I did that and I am a poetry lover and protector of poetry books, usually.

How Charlie Shavers Died and Other Poems is title of book.

Harvey Shapiro, who died on January 7, 2013, at age eighty-eight, was not an ingratiating poet. His view could be bleak, but almost always it was somehow life-affirming as well. He was often hardest on himself, though the bitterness of a poem is frequently mixed with the sweetness of humor. He had a wide range---from Jewish lore to street life in New York, from death to erotic love---and the same poem can be heartbreaking and caustically funny ("6/20/97," about visiting David Ignatow in the hospital, for example). While many of his poems take the form of pointed anecdotes with wry morals, there is frequently a strong undercurrent of deep love for what he is describing, or, in the case of the title poem of this collection, profound sadness plain and simple. I heard someone say that they thought his general lack of metaphorical language made him less approachable than other poets; that may be true, but he also wrote beautifully in the post-Williams mode. And like much of Williams (if not most of his followers), the unassuming everyday language somehow is poetry and not just prose broken up into short lines. When I saw that the only comment on How Charlie Shavers Died was by someone who rated it only one star because of "too much use of the f-word," I had to register my disagreement with such myopia (verging on total blindness).