Deer 46
Suburban Note 47
Rockport 48
Paris 49
In Prague 50
Questions 51
Green 52
Mozart Poem 53
World 54
In the Beginning 55
Dan, Age 10, Explains 56
Bush Poem 57
Hot Summer 58
“A bird in a tree …” 59
Birds 60
“Like a boy again …” 61
Remembering 62
Friday 63
Book Group 64
“I am in a warm room …” 65
The Distance 66
Rabbi Nachman’s Parable 67
For Adin 68
Dejection 69
The Mother of Invention 70
Planning 71
Honestly 72
“Where was the wisdom …” 73
Drums 74
In Argument 75
The Old Jew 76
Lines (3) 77
Departures 79
2007 81
The Office 82
In the Office 83
Hospital Poem 84
Self-Pity 85
Lines (4) 86
Luxury of Time 87
“The piece of myself …” 88
Pardoned 89
City Poem 90
Poetics 91
For Galen 92
Bright Winter 93
A Momentary Glory 94
Psalm 95
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the following publications, in which some of the poems in this volume first appeared:
Bomb: “Key West,” “The Mother of Invention,” “Dejection,” “Oppen”
The Brooklyn Rail: “Bush Poem,” “City Poem,” “Hospital Poem”
Hanging Loose: “The Keys,” “Brief Lives,” “During the Second World War,” “Pardoned”
TSR: The Southampton Review, Vol. 11, No. 1, Summer 2008: “Departures”
I also wish to acknowledge the assistance of Kathryn Levy and Julia Sheehan in tracking down and determining the original publication sources of some of the poems that were found in Harvey’s files. Many thanks to Michael Heller, old and dear friend of both Harvey and me, for reading and responding to the manuscript. To Galen Williams, whose love and devotion to Harvey was a constant throughout the time I knew him, thanks seem beside the point. As usual, Harvey said it best: “The gifts tumble from you all day.”
EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION
In his author’s note to The Sights Along the Harbor: New and Collected Poems (2006), Harvey Shapiro tells us that “the poems included here constitute the body of my work as I now see it. I count myself a lucky survivor and am pleased, as I hope readers will be, with what I’ve done with my time.” Harvey carried on, still a lucky survivor, for another seven years. He passed away on January 7, 2013, just a few weeks before his eighty-ninth birthday, after being hospitalized for a number of months. Harvey had appointed me his literary executor in 2002, a couple of years after we had met. I was deeply moved, and a little overwhelmed, by the trust he put in me, coming in, as it were, rather late in the story. But he was pleased by what I had written about him, a long essay on the Jewish dimension of his work that first appeared in Religion and Literature and later was revised for my book on Jewish American poetry, Not One of Them in Place. (The title, not incidentally, comes from Harvey’s poem “The Six Hundred Thousand Letters.”) In the spring of 2002, he and his partner, Galen Williams, visited us in Cincinnati, and he gave a wonderful reading at Xavier. Otherwise, I would see Harvey on my trips to New York, and we would speak by phone regularly. Though he would tell me how his work was coming along, especially during that period when he was assembling The Sights Along the Harbor, he did not usually share his new poems with me. About twenty pages of new poetry appears in Sights; after its publication, I knew he was continuing to write at a leisurely pace, and he would casually mention poems forthcoming in one publication or another. My impression, therefore, when I went to his apartment in Brooklyn Heights a week after his death to look over his papers, was that I would find only a handful of poems beyond the ones that he had published since Sights had appeared.
As it turns out, I was utterly mistaken. Harvey had left behind a mass of manuscript pages in two file folders. I found drafts of the dozen or so poems that had appeared in periodicals, but they were mixed together with close to a hundred pages of new work. These pages, apparently printed from Harvey’s laptop, were undated, but from internal evidence, I could tell that most of the poems had been written in the last six years. I realized quickly that there was a book here that needed to be shaped, and that Harvey was probably looking toward such a book before he entered the hospital for the last time. I spent two days on Montague Street. There on the thirty-third floor, with the apartment’s magnificent views looking south across Brooklyn and west across lower Manhattan and the harbor, I sorted through the files, keeping most of the work and setting aside only those pages that seemed unfinished or still in the process of revision. Most of the pages were either completely clean or very lightly emended in Harvey’s hand. A word might be cut or a line break altered, and in each case it struck me as just the right decision. I returned to Cincinnati, and a week later, Galen mailed me photocopies of the poems.
Organizing the manuscript proved relatively straightforward. In these poems, Harvey’s overlapping subjects and themes remain the same as in the past, as readers familiar with his work will quickly see. There are poems about the places where – he spent his last years, wry observations of city life, and of the Hamptons, and of the Florida Keys. There are poems based on his service in World War II (in 2003, the Library of America published the anthology that Harvey edited, Poets of World War II). There are
