When the World Walks toward You by Myra Shapiro (review)

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Reviewed by:

• When the World Walks toward You by Myra Shapiro
• Bonny Finberg (bio)

when the world walks toward you
Myra Shapiro
Kelsay Books
https://kelsaybooks.com/products/when-the-world-walks-toward-you?_pos=1&_sid=05092cd9c&_ss=r
75 pages; Print, $16.50

Throw a word into the room And see where it goes.

These words reflect Myra Shapiro's love affair with language and, more broadly, with the world.

Her latest book of poems isn't a "collected poems" but rather a documentation of an arrival, a travelogue, guiding us through the stops and starts, the destinations reached, on a long, eventful life. It's her personal road map: ancestral precedents, a multitude of pivotal points, transformative events, and emotional milestones that culminate from forks in the road, those taken and not taken, decisions delayed, the triumphant realization of dreams along the way, abundant rewards and inevitable losses—in other words, life.

Shapiro's life is woven of many lives, one thread leading to and joining another until a unified tapestry is apparent. She gifts us with sharp-eyed insights into her developing self, from youth to old age, from daughter to lover to wife to mother—to widow—where she finds herself at this moment in time. She is more than any one of these things, and so much more than the sum of their parts.

In this slim yet epic-like collection, Shapiro gives us a clear-eyed, nearly telescopic look into her life through which our own lives—past, present, future—might be viewed. Often, the telescope, meant to bring what is in the distance, the inevitable future, closer, is replaced with her microscopic eye, bringing us closer to what is essential, firmly situated in the moment.

Her trajectory from a warm Jewish childhood, through a southern suburb, the love of a husband and children, balancing all this while becoming a librarian, a teacher, a graduate student, to fully realized poet living in New York City, are revealed in exquisitely condensed language: [End Page 101]

In the avocado green of a kitchen,a 50s marriage, children, I wanted wings, I wanted Paris

Grief, whose shadow she was born into, runs through this collection. Born after a sister died at eleven years of age, Shapiro must have felt grief's phantom early in life. Decades later, visiting her sister's tiny, overgrown grave, left untouched for eighty years, she brings us close to the haunting presence, the living absence, death's survival within the living.

These poems reveal how, in memory, life defeats death. Shapiro reminds us that memory is served up by the world walking toward you, closely observed, embraced and absorbed. Despite the pain, there is healing there.

Living when death isThe life you haveTo live with. You mustCreate a stone to sayShirley Stein. HereWe will know she livedPainting flowers. HereHe has ordered leavesTo rise from her name.

There are significant hauntings throughout these poems. The beloved parents, lost. The anticipation of inevitable loss in a decades-long, happy marriage. Who will remain? The wife? The husband?

I was tryingto say something about love—how one day one of uswill disappear. That's whenmy eyes hauled up the sea,and my mother and father cameto make a child of me.

Her quiet use of rhyme and cadence give these poems the breath and pulse of a meditation, a proximity to self with the ease and comfort of a conversation with a best friend. Or sister. [End Page 102]

Here, the painful process of caring for a dying husband when the inevitable swoops down like a raptor:

Because I wanted to laugh. Because these days I cry sounexpectedlyI wanted to write a poem I'd call "The Man I Lug." Husband,It's you, the man I love who can't stand or walk. Our bed is one-sided.

Yet, by virtue of having been born into it, she is a survivor of death. She will do what is necessary. There is living to be done.

She presents this with haiku-like distillation.

At 84, a widow, my kneeis...