Synopses & Reviews
Review
"Shapiro's latest collection contains a fairly wide assortment, as the title suggests, of poems ranging from the interpretation of public events and satirical thrusts at popular culture to translations and myth, Shapiro uses traditional ingredients of stanza form, meter, and rhyme adeptly. His wit is too heavy-handed at times, but he is occasionally tender and perceptive or bright and buoyant. The tone is ironic, especially in the treatment
of American consumerism and academia. A few memorable poems in this volume are 'The Sense of Beauty'—on the perverseness of man and art—and 'The Heiligenstadt Testament,' a long monologue of the dying Beethoven. The book ends with two translations from Catullus and a retelling of the Philomela myth." Reviewed by Robert Jackson, Virginia Quarterly Review (Copyright 2006 Virginia Quarterly Review)