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Robert B. Shaw explores the depths of experience, childhood, memory, and his midwestern roots: The days go slowly but the years go fast. / Old movies used to bridge the story’s gaps / by morphing falling leaves to frantic snow …
The heart of his book is a series of meditations on his wife’s illness, passing, and what remains after–the vivid memories of time well-spent: We used to work / together at it, each on a different side, / she stirring, measuring, tasting, I / chopping, dicing, mincing as required. / Rocking the blade the way she showed me to, / I freed from each raw thing a smell we liked: / the garlic’s earthy reek, the ginger’s sting, / the anise wisping up from celery leaves.
Robert B. Shaw anchors A Late Spring, and After with a group of beautiful elegies for his wife. These recall, in their deep feeling and stylistic distinction, Thomas Hardy’s Poems of 1912-13. No less impressive are the other poems in this book. Time and again, Shaw brings his subjects to life with memorable description. Handles of tools look like lemon jelly petrified. A man smokes on a dark porch at night, making himself evident by inhaling, / rousing an ember-dot of hot vermilion. And the subjects themselves encompass an extraordinarily wide range of experience. Plants and animals, youth and age, private life and public history–everything is here in glorious enchantment and detail. –Timothy Steele
Robert B. Shaw is the author of six books of poetry, the latest of which, Aromatics, was co-winner of The Poets’ Prize. For his prose work, Blank Verse: A Guide to Its History and Use, he received the Robert Fitzgerald Award. He recently retired from Mount Holyoke College, where he was the Emily Dickinson Professor of English.
