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What Remains to Be Said invites a sense of connectedness and gratitude. As in the opening Morning Song, Shaw’s mastery of words also unbinds us from words, and we enter the dark behind our eyes. Rhythmic tones carry us through place and time, with cicadas, monarchs, the moon, the tree, a pulse, the key-as guides.
We enter Comforting the Wilderness (1977) with a dinner party, sensing the weaving beginning like the rainbow dancing down the table. In A Late Spring, and After (2016), we encounter The shadow of a falling leaf which plummeted down the page I read, freed from the linear construct of time. Shaw gives us crayons to color memory impressions. Ice time. Starfish to dispel linearity. Geode time, crystalline art.
With love, the thumbprint plants a maze, and perspectives scale from two to one to zero. Fingering paths of waters, ferns, and goldenrods construct a trellis to hold the fragility of life. Great and heavy themes emerge from the woods in our side yards. In the glee of wild turkeys, we find solemnity. This seashell offering spirals us in and out of words, giving life to our art and art to our life.
In his new and selected poems, What Remains to Be Said, Robert B. Shaw gives us the full human range of his verse as he charts his life from gains to losses, joy to grief, with irony, wit, and compassion. From the masterful ‘The Post Office Murals Restored’ to the heartbreaking ‘The Loss of the Joy of Cooking, ’ he shows how with changing circumstances and the gift of his talent the satirist can become an elegist. A key poem in the collection is ‘Lacrimae Rerum.’ There the poet meditates on a misreading of ‘tears’ rhyming with ‘fears’ and ‘tears’ rhyming with ‘cares.’ The emotional response of the tears of things, he understands, is brought forth by the physical damage of the tears in things. I have read and admired Shaw’s work for half a century and regard this volume, a gathering of poems from the 1970s to the present, as essential reading for anyone who cares about contemporary American poetry. -Mark Jarman, author of The Heronry (poems) and Dailiness (essays)
