Tantalus in Love

by Alan Shapiro

Book Overview

Alan Shapiro is at his most passionate in this collection. A work full of life, jealousy, lust, and romantic abandon, Tantalus in Love begins with the sorrow of a disintegrating marriage, with its anger and suspicion, its hurt and rage, but moves on to celebrate the resilience of love after loss and the awakening glory of an amorous middle age. Reinventing myth and symbol in lyrical portraits of astounding resonance, Shapiro's poems yearn with...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0618773649
• ISBN13: 9780618773640
• Release Date: September 2006
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Length: 88 Pages
• Weight: 0.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.6" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Another great reflection on tragedy by Shapiro

I must confess, I'm not much of a fan of confessional style poetry. Yet, Shapiro has consistently, to my mind, produced great collections in this style. In Song and Dance, he grappled with those big issues of love, life, and death alongside the smaller ones of how to retain personal memories of a sibling, qualify his own coming of age, and ultimately deal with the grief that accompanied his loss. When I read it, I found it an excellent collection of poems. So what of Tantalus in Love? Here Shapiro addresses the estrangement in his marriage, divorce, jealousy, and finally the possibility of finding love again and driving those old memories away. As a whole, it is ultimately a sort of quest that ends in his own personal redemption, with the demons of his past tragedies (loss of parents, siblings, and marriage) finally cast out. Once again, Shapiro has produced a fine collection of poems that present a coherent whole while remaining enjoyable and powerful on their own.