From a winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award, a new collection that explores the vagaries of love and the place of beauty in a time of war.

In October 2002, at the age of fifty, Alan Shapiro collapsed while playing basketball. A few months later, on the eve of America’s invasion of Iraq, he remarried. The beginning of this happy chapter of his life coincided with a keen reminder of his own mortality and the menacing nature of the times we live in. The poems in Old War, Shapiro’s ninth and most innovative collection, were written under the double aspect of love and fear, of hope that comes with any fresh start and the sense that history will eventually undo or destroy whatever we struggle to make. Through an impressive variety of forms and styles, from first-person lyrics to dramatic monologues spoken by characters ranging from a country and western singer to a Jewish comic doing standup in heaven, they cast brilliant light on the nature of art, love, and family in a world defined by brutality, deception, and instability.

"With its many characters, forms and storylines and its repeated looks at death and old age, this tenth outing from the widely-respected Shapiro (Mixed Company) could be both the saddest, and the most various, of his works. The poet opens with meticulous stanzas about transience and loss, from the newsworthy casualties of suicide bombs to the passing shadows in bedrooms and trains. He concludes with marvelously inventive poems about male professions and types, each with his own form of sin and pain-a 'Country-Western Singer' whose rough rhymes describe an alcoholic's arc, a dying political fixer ('Handler') whose Southern-fried diction belies his Tolstoyan regret. In between come lyric poems of autobiography, in blank verse and in clipped short lines. In one pathos-filled page of prose, new amours and familial affections coexist with repeated mourning-for his late sister and brother and for the diminished capacities of his ailing parents, who have moved in with him. Shapiro writes well of athletes' achievements, of his own day-to-day choices, of pride and hope. He sounds most at home, though, with disappointment, resignation and grief, as in 'Last Wedding Attended by the Gods': 'Love was/ the sensation/ of the promise of// more love to come,' he writes there: 'Nothing ever/ changed/ until it did.'" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Alan Shapiro is the William R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is the author of nine acclaimed books of poetry. He is a former recipient of the Kingsley Tufts Award and the Los Angeles Book Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He was recently elected as a fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

CONTENTS

I OLD WAR • 3 BOWER • 5 HARVEST • 7 EGG ROLLS • 8 PRAYER FOR A NEW HOME • 11 PEOPLE GET READY • 13 DOG AND OWNER • 14 BREAKING NEWS • 16 NEWS CONFERENCE • 17 SOOTHSAYERS • 18 LAST WEDDING ATTENDED BY THE GODS • 20 WE • 22 SUSPENSION BRIDGE • 23 COLD • 25 DAY • 26 BEFORE • 27 LUCK • 28 EASY STREET • 29

II SOME • 33 NIGHT • 34 AFTER • 35 HOW • 36 MIST • 37 JUST • 38 BLACK • 39 LISTEN • 40 LATE • 42 TIME PIECE • 43 WATCH • 45 NIGHT BLOOM • 48 FALLING • 50 WHERE • 51 HEAT • 53 CLEAR • 54 NOW • 55

III from The Book of Last Thoughts PASSENGER • 59 NARCISSIST • 60 COUNTRY-WESTERN SINGER • 62 I • 64 BRAWLER • 65 SKATEBOARDER • 66 RUNNER • 68 TRANSCENDENTALIST • 69 DENTIST • 71 BROTHER • 72 FAMILY MAN • 75 HANDLER • 77 MAYOR • 80 LANGUAGE • 81 OUTFIELDER • 82 POET • 83 OPEN-MIKE NIGHT IN HEAVEN • 85 NOTES • 89