Description
Poetry. Taking its title from Alban Berg's famed violin concerto, IN MEMORY OF AN ANGEL is packed with erudition, pursuing themes of art history, architecture, literature, and Jewish identity. In this, his first full-length collection in fifteen years, New York School maestro David Shapiro achieves a rare combination of lyrical abstraction and postmodern self-referentiality, rendered with his understated virtuosity. Yet there's a strong current of love poetry flowing through these avant-garde ruminations, as well as reminiscences of childhood and reflections on fatherhood. A surrealistic violation of the boundary between the real and the dream pervades IN MEMORY OF AN ANGEL. Shapiro's poems take a bewildering variety of forms, many of his own invention, even as he is equally at home in the quotidian and anecdotal. Andy Warhol, Allen Ginsberg, Jasper Johns, Frank O'Hara—these are only some of the characters peopling Shapiro's New York, a landscape both sophisticated and haunted by memory.
"An erudite and relentlessly modernizing mind...[Shapiro's] aleatory, portent-free sophistication seems confident enough to accommodate primitive, endearing, and frankly tender tropes and situations...The effect is of unforeseen intimacy at the heart of abstraction."—The New Yorker
Author Bio
David Shapiro is a member of the second-generation of New York School poets. A child prodigy on the violin, he is also a literary and art critic and presently teaches art history at Patterson College and literature at Cooper Union. He published his first poem at age 13 and his first collection, January (1965), at age 18. Subsequent volumes include Poems from Deal (1969), A Man Holding an Acoustic Panel (1971), The Page- Turner (1972), Lateness (1977), To an Idea (1983), House (Blown Apart) (1988), After a Lost Original (1994), A Burning Interior (2002), and New and Selected Poems (1965-2006) (2007). He has also edited volumes of selected poems by Frank Lima and Joseph Ceravolo, co-edited An Anthology of New York Poets (1969), and written monographs on John Ashbery, Jasper Johns, Jim Dine, and Mondrian. He holds a PhD from Columbia University and has received awards from the Merrill Foundation, the NEA, the NEH, and the Graham Foundation. He lives in Riverdale, the Bronx, NYC.
Author City: BRONX, NY USA