In Memory of an Angel

“David Shapiro is a great poet, one of the best poets writing today: his poems are musical, capacious, dark, funny, life-affirming, skeptical, and passionate (‘Owl astronaut burgeoning owl is a gift / You give to me give to you / Terrible other things happen. / We stay on our branch. / A hundred eyes / Two will do’; ‘Or prayer without hope / Or singing in a time of hopelessness / Or behaving like morning poets at night’; ‘Turn him around / In your wind / In your hand / In his dry marvelous sound O word / In the ground / In, in / In your round song’). Repetition and variation enact and embody what is necessary: music is thought is dramatic action: Shapiro’s poems breathe and think and feel with the finest, most intense, and most generous awareness. In Memory of an Angel is a masterpiece, a book we need now and will need forever.”–Joseph Lease “A musically musing, erudite, yet light-footed collection that revitalizes a key poetic movement.”-Booklist Praise for David Shapiro: “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 “David Shapiro has an incredible mastery of the language and an ear sensitive to every nuance of idiom and rhythm.”–Poetry

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 (19652006) (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.

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