A Late Spring, and After

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.