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Overview
“Jane Shore is the poet of little ambushes, moments that hold us hostage, moments when we come to life.” — Julia Alvarez
Since Robert Fitzgerald praised Eye Level, Jane Shore’s 1977 Juniper Prize–winning first collection, for its “cool but venturesome eye,” her work has continued to receive the highest accolades and attention from critics and fellow poets. That Said: New and Selected Poems extends Shore’s lifelong, vivid exploration of memory—her childhood in New Jersey, her Jewish heritage, her adult years in Vermont. Shore’s devotion to her familiar coterie of departed parents, aunts, uncles, and friends passionately subscribes to Sholem Aleichem’s dictum that “eternity resides in the past.”
United States Poet Laureate W. S. Merwin wrote, “Shore’s characters emerge with an etched clarity . . . She performs this summoning with a language of quiet directness, grace and exactness, clear and without affectations.” And while there is no “typical” Jane Shore poem, what unifies them is her bittersweet introspection, elegant restraint, provocative autobiography, and on every page a magnetic readability.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780547687353 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins Publishers |
| Publication date: | 02/27/2024 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 289 |
| File size: | 473 KB |
About the Author
JANE SHORE is the author of many books of poetry, including, A Yes or No Answer and Music Minus One, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has won the Juniper Prize and the Lamont Poetry Prize.
JANE SHORE is the author of many books of poetry, including, A Yes or No Answer and Music Minus One, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has won the Juniper Prize and the Lamont Poetry Prize.
Read an Excerpt
Willow
It didn’t weep the way a willow should.
Planted all alone in the middle of the field
by the bachelor who sold our house to us,
shoulder height when our daughter was born,
it grew eight feet a year until it blocked
the view through the first-, then the second-
story windows, its straggly canopy obstructing
our sunrise and moonrise over Max Gray Road.
I gave it the evil eye, hoping lightning
would strike it, the way a bolt had split
the butternut by the barn. And if leaf blight
or crown gall or cankers didn’t kill it, then
I’d gladly pay someone to chop it down.
My daughter said no, she loved that tree,
and my husband agreed. One wet Sunday—
husband napping, daughter at a matinee
in town—a wind shear barreled up the hill
so loud I glanced up from my mystery
the moment the willow leaned, bowed,
and fell over flat on its back, roots and all,
splayed on the ground like Gulliver.
The house shook, just once.
Later, when the sun came out, neighbors
came to gawk; they chain-sawed thicker
branches, wrapped chains around the trunk,
their backhoe ripped out pieces of stump
and root as if extracting a rotten tooth.
I’m not sorry that tree is gone. No one
ever sat under it for shade or contemplation.
Yet spring after spring it reliably leafed out.
It was always the last to lose its leaves
in fall. It should have died a decade ago
for all the grief I gave it, my dirty looks
apparently the fuel on which it thrived.
It must have done its weeping in private.
But now I can see the slope of the hill.
Did my wishful thinking cast a spell?
I was the only one on earth who saw it fall.
Priorities
Sleeping alone in my Madison Avenue
Upper East Side seventeen-by-seventeen
fourth-floor walkup one night thirty
years ago, I heard people arguing
through the plaster and brick wall dividing
my brownstone from the one next door.
I’d hardly given my neighbors a second thought
except those I’d occasionally see in the hall
retrieving mail, struggling up narrow stairs
with grocery bags, or leashing their dogs.
I used to amuse myself by matching up faces
with the names above the intercom buttons
in the vestibule downstairs, but I never
stopped for anything more than chitchat,
never thought about the people living
in the adjacent building until the night I hear
a woman crying loud enough to rouse me,
and a deeper voice, a man’s, whose words
I can’t make out but whose angry bellowing
bullies me awake. Perhaps they’re actors
rehearsing a play, or he’s her drama coach
and she’s practicing her lines from the scene
where the man and the woman fight.
I’m thinking I should dial 911 when—
through the white noise of my hissing radiator—
he shouts, “You’ve got to order your priorities!”
like a therapist on an emergency house call,
which works. She’s whimpering like a dog.
There follows a clearing of the moment’s
throat, a sponging of tears, a charged silence,
as if now they’re making love and all before
was foreplay. And I’m in bed with them.
How many times have I had to listen—
half attracted, half repelled—to strangers’ thumps
and moans in the hotel room next to mine?
Their dramas? And next morning share the same
elevator (too bright, too small) to the lobby.
I have nothing to be ashamed of. But I’m feeling
that same tongue-tied strangeness I used to feel
with a one-night stand the morning after.
Fortune Cookies
My old boyfriend’s fortune cookie read,
Your love life is of interest only to yourself.
Not news to me. A famous writer
once showed me the fortune in his wallet—
You must curb your lust for revenge—
slapped over his dead mother’s face.
After finishing our Chinese meal
at that godforsaken mall,
eight of us crowded around the table,
the white tablecloth sopping up
islands of spilled soy sauce and beer,
the waiter brought tea and oranges
sliced into eighths and a plate of fortune cookies.
We played our after-dinner game—
each of us saying our line out loud,
the chorus adding its coda:
“You will meet hundreds of people...” “In bed.”
“Every man is a volume if you know how to read him...” “In bed.”
“You have unusual equipment for success...” “In bed.”
And those with more delicate sensibilities,
new to the group, blushed
and checked their wristwatches.
We divided up the bill, and split.
A few left their fortunes behind.
The rest slipped those scraps of hope or doom
into pockets and pocketbooks to digest later.
Maybe one or two of us got lucky that night
and had a long and happy life in bed.
On the ride home, I absent-mindedly
rolled my fortune into a tight coil,
the way you roll a joint, and dropped it
into my coat pocket,
and found it yesterday—
oh, how many years later—
caught between the stitches of the seam,
like one of those notes
wedged into a niche of the Wailing Wall
that someday God might read in bed
and change a life.
Chatty Cathy
The first time I got my hands on her,
I took off all her clothes—to see
exactly where her voice came from.
I pulled the white plastic O-ring
knotted to the pull string in her back,
pulled it, gently, as far as it would go,
and Chatty Cathy threw her voice—
not from her closed pretty pink lips
but from the open speaker-grille in her chest.
Chatty Cathy was her own ventriloquist!
She said eighteen phrases at random,
chatting up anyone who’d pull her string.
Tell me a story. Will you play with me?
What can we do now? Do you love me?
Did I love her? I loved her so much
I had to be careful not to wear her out.
Even though she always “talked back,”
behavior my parents would have spanked me for,
there wasn’t a naughty bone in her
hard little body! When she’d say,
Carry me. Change my dress. Take me with you.
Brush my hair—she always said Please.
When she’d say, Let’s play school.
Let’s have a party. Let’s play house—
she’d flash me her charming potbelly.
May I have a cookie? she’d sweetly ask,
in that high fake goody-goody voice.
She wasn’t allowed to eat or drink—
it would gunk up the mini record player
inside her chest. May I have a cookie?
She’d pester me while I combed her hair
and buttoned her dress for a tea party.
I’m hungry—she’d point her index finger at me until
I held a pretend cookie against her lips
and poured her another empty cup of tea.
May I have a cookie? May I have a cookie?
Finally, one afternoon I gave her one,
squishing it into the holes of her grille.
After that, sometimes she’d start talking
all by herself, a loud deep gargling
that shook her body—limbs akimbo,
skirt inching up—showing her panties
with the MADE IN HONG KONG tag
still attached. I HURT myself! she cried.
Please carry me. I’m hungry. I’m sleepy.
She awoke with two black marks on her leg
and a crack on her back along the seam.
A rash of Chatty Pox dotted her cheeks.
Give me a kiss, she ordered, and I did.
I’d do anything to shut her up.
Where are we going? bratty Chatty Cathy
warbled for the last time.
She stopped wanting to play. Stopped
saying I love you. Next, laryngitis.
Then a growling sound.
Her O-ring cracked off, the frayed
string a strangled loop spooling
inside her damaged voice box.
Then she was mute, stiffly propped
against my bed pillow like a fancy
boudoir doll made only for show.
Table of Contents
New Poems
Willow 3
Priorities 5
Fortune Cookies 7
Chatty Cathy 9
Danny Kaye at the Palace 12
My Father’s Shoe Trees 14
Last Words 16
Pickwick 18
Gratitude 20
A Reminder 22
American Girls 24
Mirror/Mirror 28
Gaslight 30
Staging Your House 32
Where to Find Us 34
Rainbow Weather 36
Eye Level (1977)
Witness 41
The Advent Calendar 42
A Letter Sent to Summer 46
Noon 48
Home Movies: 1949 49
Fortunes Pantoum 50
The Lifeguard 52
Sounding the Lake 53
Eye Level 56
The Minute Hand (1987)
A Clock 73
Pharaoh 76
Young Woman on the Flying Trapeze 78
The Russian Doll 81
Anthony 85
Thumbelina 87
High Holy Days 89
The Game of Jackstraws 92
Tender Acre 95
Wood 97
Persian Miniature 99
the Glass Slipper 101
Dresses 103
A Luna Moth 107
The Island 110
Music Minus One (1996)
Washing the Streets of Holland 115
Monday 118
Learning to Read 120
Best Friend 124
The Sunroom 126
The Holiday Season 129
The Slap 135
The House of Silver Blondes 138
Music Minus One 141
Meat 144
Workout 147
The Wrong End of the Telescope 150
Missing 155
Postpartum, Honolulu 157
The Bad Mother 159
The Sound of Sense 162
Holocaust Museum 164
The Lazy Susan 167
The Combination 171
Happy Family (1999)
Happy Family 177
Crazy Joey 180
Mrs. Hitler 182
The Uncanny 185
The Best-Dressed Girl in School 188
My Mother’s Space Shoes 192
Evil Eye 196
Fairbanks Museum and Planetarium 198
Reprise 203
Shit Soup 206
My Mother’s Mirror 208
Happiness 211
A Yes-or-No Answer (2008)
A Yes-or-No Answer 217
The Streak 219
My Mother’s Chair 221
The Closet 224
Possession 226
Trouble Dolls 228
The Blue Address Book 230
Dummy 233
Shopping Urban 236
My Mother’s Foot 238
Keys 240
Trick Candles 242
My Father’s Visits 244
Unforgettable 246
Dream City 250
Body and Soul 253
God’s Breath 256
On the Way Back from Goodwill 258
Fugue 260
Scrabble in Heaven 262
Gelato 264
Acknowledgments 267