Love in the Middle Years.
by Margarite Nathe
Tantalus in Love: Poems. By Alan Shapiro. Houghton Mifflin Company, 87 pages, $22.00.
A sixteen-year-old boy dove for a loose ball during basketball practice one day and broke his wrist. He couldn’t play for the rest of the season. Disappointed and bored, Alan Shapiro picked up a pen and started writing poems.
“I formed the same kind of competitive relationship with poetry that I had with basketball,” Shapiro says. “I found people who wrote well and I imitated them like I did the older kids down at the playground that were making moves and doing things that I wanted to do. I studied other poets’ moves and tried to imitate them.”
His wrist mended. Decades later, he’s still writing poetry, more nimbly than ever. Shapiro’s newest collection, Tantalus in Love, begins with the collapse of a marriage and ends with the renewal of love. The title poem describes Tantalus, a character from Greek mythology, and his anguish as tree branches dangle above him but are blown out of reach just as he is about to grasp their fruit. Frustrated, angry words from a quarrel between a suspicious husband and an indifferent wife are scattered throughout Tantalus’s torment.
Another poem deals with love after loss. “Bounty” is the story of two lovers who drift with each other in a dream state in front of an oscillating fan, and who feel the breeze as
“only the faintest rippling
of cool air like a ghostly lotion
that vanishes
as soon as spread along the skin.”
Other poems in the collection deal with the effects of parents’ separation on their children, the anxiety and excitement of starting over after divorce, and acquiring the capacity to be hurt again in order to start afresh.
Shapiro doesn’t play much basketball these days. Instead, he teaches creative writing classes and explores the civilizing effects of writing about uncivil emotions and experiences, which he says “encourages hope that we can become better than we are.”
“I get great joy out of writing,” he says. “Even when I’m writing about unjoyful experiences.”
Alan Shapiro is the William R. Kenan, Jr., Distinguished Professor of English and creative writing at Carolina.
Margarite Nathe is a writer and editorial assistant at Endeavors magazine.
