|
An incisive string of meditations on a misbegotten war and seven decades of the author s intellectual life, The General is Asked His Opinion and other sad songs 2002 2005 is Omar Shapli's combined idea of memoir, treatise, and playground rendered in multi-chromal verse. Massachusetts poet Omar Shapli's first book of poetry finds the author exploring the personal, the political, and the polemic past and present in a dizzying array of styles and wordthoughtexperiments. Brace for jolts: they are information, Shapli warns early on in Alone Among the Whippoorwills, a line that resonates even divorced from its context. The General Is Asked His Opinion and other sad songs 2002 2005 jumps from theme to theme and form to form with energizing, entertaining, contemporary antithesis. The severely enjambed Persistent Traveller is a slim, plunging, two-page icicle, then the following poem, Another Bush, comes off like the backend of a piece of sarcastic, presidential-dynasty wordplay: and what they told me was this/the visionthing eschewed by dad/lurks now in the nascent galahad. Elsewhere, Shapli expresses his WaronTerror misgivings and insights in lyrical, run-on, and straight prose verse. He can be overly loquacious, bluntly declarative, or linguistically irresponsible, as the mood merrily strikes him.
|
