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    Solving for X: Poems
    Solving for X: Poems
    Solving for X: Poems
    Ebook78 pages1 hour

    Solving for X: Poems

    By Robert B. Shaw

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    About this ebook

    In Solving for X, his award-winning collection of new poems, Robert B. Shaw probes the familiar and encounters the unexpected; in the apparently random he discerns a hidden order. Throughout, Shaw ponders the human frailties and strengths that continue to characterize us, with glances at the stresses of these millennial times that now test our mettle and jar our complacency. Often touched with humor, his perceptions are grounded in devoted observation of the changing world.

    As in his previous collections, Shaw in these poems unites conversational vigor with finely crafted metrical lines. Final judge Rachel Hadas says it best: “Solving for X is droll and puzzled, elegiac and satirical in equal measure. Shaw’s attention alights on a variety of more and less tangible things—a seed catalog, a shirt, a bad book, a request for a letter of recommendation, an irritating colleagues’s death—which his masterfully packed lines then proceed to light up with deliberate and unforgettable authority.”

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOhio University Press
    Release dateJun 15, 2009
    ISBN9780821441206
    Solving for X: Poems
    Author

    Robert B. Shaw

    Robert B. Shaw is a professor of English at Mount Holyoke College. He writes frequently on modern and contemporary poetry. His own books of poems include Below the Surface and Solving for X (winner of the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize).

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      Book preview

      Solving for X - Robert B. Shaw

      The Future Perfect

      It will be recognizable: your neighborhood,

      with of course some of the bigger trees

      gone for pulp and the more upscale houses

      sporting new riot-proof fencing which

      they seem hardly to need in this calm sector

      whose lawns look even more vacuumed than they used to.

      Only a soft whirr of electric automobiles

      ruffles unburdened air. Your own house looks

      about the same, except for the solar panels.

      Inside, the latest occupants sit facing

      the wall-size liquid crystal flat TV screen

      they haggle and commune with, ordering beach towels

      or stockings, or instructing their stockbrokers,

      while in the kitchen dinner cooks itself.

      Why marvel over windows that flip at a touch

      from clear to opaque, or carpets that a lifetime

      of scuffs will never stain? This all was destined,

      down to the newest model ultrasound toothbrush.

      Only the stubborn, ordinary ratio

      of sadness to happiness seems immune to progress,

      and it will take more time than even you

      have at your disposal to find out why.

      The same and not the same, this venue fascinates,

      spiriting you through closed familiar doors

      on random unremarkable evenings when

      you will have been gone

      for how long? — Just a bit longer than your successors

      have had to make these premises their own.

      However much their climate-controlled rooms

      glow vibrant with halogen, they will not see you.

      But they may wonder why, for no clear reason,

      they find their thoughts so often drawn to the past.

      Back Again

      The wormy apple tree

      we chainsawed to a stump

      is not content to be

      a barren amputee.

      It has produced a clump

      of rank and spindly shoots,

      a thicket still unthinned,

      each one a witch’s wand,

      suggesting that the roots

      regard our surgery

      as one more hostile thing

      to overcome in spring,

      like parried blades of wind —

      mischief to live beyond.

      A Bowl of Stone Fruit

      Never forget the child’s face, nonplused

      on touching first an apple, then a pear,

      then a banana, his bewildered stare

      becoming peevish as his buoyant trust

      in the appearances that grown-ups prize

      founders. Items for which his taste buds lusted

      are for display, and regularly dusted.

      Try to explain how people feast their eyes

      on such a centerpiece, how they are able

      to cherish a quartz peach, whose blushing skin

      is bonded pigment, stone bearing within

      no stone a tree would spring from. Now the table

      stands taller than his head; but watch him grow,

      to grow unflustered by the cold and hard

      baubles adult taste holds in fond regard.

      Never forget his face, first made to know.

      Airs and Graces

      All this was years ago — back in the days

      of afternoon visits between ladies

      with children brought along, resigned to boredom.

      Her mother always stayed for a second cup;

      her mother’s aunt, happy to be a hostess,

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