'Old War' by Alan Shapiro

Poems

Alan Shapiro

Houghton Mifflin: 90 pp., $22

DEATH is everywhere in Alan Shapiro's ninth book of poetry, "Old War." Or maybe it's less death than the awareness of death, the recognition that all things are evanescent, that "time's more like / a pool now than a river, / a pool whose glassy / skin of trees, clouds, / sky, the world entire, / my every step / is shattering / like a stone."

These are songs not of innocence, but of experience, the work of a poet who understands loss and longing but also knows enough not to be subsumed by them, to appreciate the small illuminations they allow. In "Easy Street," one of the collection's finest poems, a doomed man in Pompeii, soon to be buried by the eruption of Vesuvius, considers himself "lucky" to be in his lover's sustaining embrace. "Rain coming on so suddenly," he reflects, "That we stop to listen, / Holding each other, / A couple suddenly entombed, / For all we know, / Beneath a rain of ash / From the exploding mountain."

What "Easy Street" represents is a metaphor for "Old War" as a whole, a sense of how tragedy and triumph bleed together. This is a notion to which Shapiro returns throughout the collection, framing almost every interaction through this double lens. "Luck" -- there it is again -- describes an act of passion: "even / as your back arch- es, / and the cry / you cry then is / the opposite of grief." In "After," Shapiro recalls his brother and sister, both of whom died of cancer, in the wake of "the last scan's last bad news, / and the breakdown, and then / the bitter composure / in the hospital cafeteria, . . . 'You're dying, / and the food is awful, / and the portions are small.' "

There is humor here, in an oddly fatalistic way, but even more there is acceptance, release almost, a kind of willful recognition of our ephemerality. "I couldn't tell you where the Lord was traveling," Shapiro writes in "People Get Ready," but "as he passed I saw / he no more thought of me / than a train thinks / of the sparks scattering / under its iron weight, / bright, then dark." That's a gorgeous image, and exactly right, for this is what we are, brief sparks flashing, momentary bursts of illumination animated by a creative force so indifferent that "it / exaggerates our self- / importance even / to think you would / ignore the prayer."