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  • That Said, New and Selected Poems by Jane Shore
  • John Meredith Hill (bio)
Jane Shore, That Said, New and Selected Poems (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012), 269 pp.

Jane Shore’s That Said, New and Selected Poems arrives four years after A Yes or No Answer (2008), winner of the 2010 Poet’s Prize. It’s a generous collection of peer-honored work that may secure for Shore the attention of that larger poetry-reading public said to exist beyond the nation’s universities and major metropolitan areas. For more than four decades she has been writing savvy and sometimes sassy poems, many of them limning the worlds of her two families, a mother, father, and young sister with whom she lived as a midcentury child in an apartment above the parents’ dress shop in North Bergen, New Jersey—in the aggrieved voice of a thirteen-year old self not enabled by her mother to reign as teen fashion plate, Shore writes “My mother was famous./ She owned the best dress shop in town. / . . . Why was my mother so stingy?” (“The Best Dressed Girl in School”)—and more recently with her daughter and husband in homes in metro Washington, D.C., and rural Vermont. Recalling her twelve-year-old daughter’s wish to streak her hair, Shore says “because it was her mantra, breakfast, lunch, and dinner / because she would do it even if we said no— // her father and I argued until we finally said / okay, just a little one in the front / and don’t ask for any more, and, also, / no double pierces in the future, is that a deal?” (“The Streak”).

From five books beginning with the 1977 Juniper Prize Eye Level, Shore has selected seventy-six poems for inclusion in That Said, and she introduces the collection with sixteen new ones. The title poem from A Yes or No Answer exemplifies the spirited, technically-resourceful poem she can produce:

Did you lie to me, like Pinocchio? Was forbidden fruit the cause of woe? Did you ever sleep with that so-and-so? Just answer the question: yes or no.

Did you nail her under the mistletoe? Will you spare me the details, blow by blow? Did she sing sweeter than a vireo? I need an answer: Yes or no?

The backstory suggested by this pair of quatrains from a thirty-two line interrogation conducted in a relentlessly entertaining mono-rhyme—for the general reader, if not the “you”—calls to mind Adrienne Rich’s remark about how the demands of form may serve as “asbestos gloves” for the handling of emotionally explosive material. Although Rich turned away from some established notions about poetic craft to write the poems she needed to write, the truth of her observation about form endures. One [End Page 272] thinks, for instance, of Elizabeth Bishop’s resort to the villanelle for the difficult life review she conducts in “One Art.” Shore studied with Bishop— two poems included in That Said were written for her—and many in the collection display a response to the world reminiscent of Bishop’s own. Like Bishop, Shore can see in the familiar something strange and render the strange familiar:

Beside the white mulch of their chenille bedspread, my parents’ Baby Ben wind-up alarm was three minutes off. Each night, its moon face, a luminous and mortuary green, guided me between my parents’ sleeping forms where I slept until the mechanism of my sister’s hunger, accurate as quartz, woke my mother and me moments before the alarm clock sprang my father to the sink

(“The Glass Slipper”)

Other accomplished poems recalling Bishop’s work while realizing their own distinctive voice and narrative thrust include “High Holy Days”:

Our neighbor who owned the laundry down the street covered his left wrist out of habit— numbers indelible as those he inked on my father’s shirt collars. Once, I saw that whole arm disappear into a tub of soapy shirts, rainbowed, buoyant as the pastel clouds

in The Illustrated Children’s Bible, where God’s enormous hand reached down and stopped a heathen army in its tracks.

and “The Holiday Season”:

Was...

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