That Self-Forgetful Perfectly Useless Concentration

By: Alan Shapiro

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Paperback | 1 November 2016 | Edition Number 1

At a Glance

Paperback
192 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
2.16 x 1.42 x 0.11

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More than a gathering of essays, That Self-Forgetful Perfectly Useless Concentration is part memoir, part literary criticism, and an artful fusion of the two. It is an intimate portrait of a life in poetry that only Alan Shapiro could have written.

In this book, Shapiro brings his characteristic warmth, humor, and many years as both poet and teacher to bear on questions surrounding two preoccupations: the role of conventionsâ"of literary and social normsâ"in how we fashion our identities on and off the page, and how suffering both requires and resists self-expression. He sketches affectionate portraits of his early teachers, revisits the deaths of his brother and sister, and examines poems that have helped him navigate troubled times. Integrating storytelling and literary analysis so seamlessly that art and life become extensions of each other, Shapiro embodies in his lively prose the very qualities he celebrates in the poems he loves.

Brimming with wit and insight, this is a book for poets, students and scholars of poetry, teachers of literature, and everyone who cares about the literary arts and how they illuminate our personal and public lives.

Industry Reviews

"Philip Larkin said, 'Writing poems should be a pleasure. So should reading them, by God!' As should essays about poetry, which almost never are. But Alan Shapiro's are. Smart, funny, earnest, erudite, dexterous, and down to earth, they both teach and delight in connecting the highest arts of poetry to the basics of lived life."--Michael Ryan, author of This Morning

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