Open Your Ears

Oh, to be the poet Daniel Shapiro! The whimsical narrative poems in Child with a Swan’s Wings, bring forth such things as mermen in showers, the deepest thoughts of an Incan rodent, the history of a brick, even the emotions of a shadow. To read through the five sections of this book (and a “coda”) is to time travel, bounce between seen and unseen worlds, and slip into other dimensions. Each poem opens a door to imagined realms of the vastest dimensions. Honestly, it is how I imagine it would be to go on an ayahuasca retreat, if such an experience could be distilled into poetry.

Shapiro, who has authored two previous books of poetry published by Dos Madres and won accolades for his translations of Chilean poet Tómas Harris, and Mexican short story author, Roberto Ransom, traverses a cataclysmic range of material here. Everything from a poem about a fart (“They’ve been with us / since the first Tyrannosaurus / blasted a mastodon with gas”) to a farcical poem about a murder (“When they stuffed him in the hamper, / his oily fingers slid against hers / but she quickly broke each one. // It was over.”).

As you might deduce from these examples, these are poems spiced up with a strong sense of levity and folly, yet do not think for a second Shapiro is not serious. For even when he rhapsodizes about a little Dutch girl who “laughs at a puddle” in the poem “Rhymes,” there is another layer of meaning that emerges, one of longing and sheer beauty: “She’s the child I’ll never have, / emerald flicker through a screen of leaves.” And the seriousness is not merely a patina; the poem, like many in the book, is formal, a collection of rhymed couplets so artful the rhymes can sneak right past you at first, even with that title. It manages to accomplish the mammoth task of being slight and heavy, amusing and sad, formal without drawing attention to form.

While I enjoy a good fart joke or artful rhyme as much as the next person, it is this deeper longing and sparkle that moves me most in Shapiro’s poems. Even in “Tinklestein Lullaby,” perhaps the silliest poem in the collection, about an imagined town where mice chortle, pig’s whistle, and a woman “sings between burps,” longing and sparkle make a breathtaking appearance, complete with braided and clever internal rhymes:

The moon rounds the Tinklestein  sun in a wild goose chase.And at midnight, crosses its face, they  become one.

Shapiro, while wildly original and phantasmagorical, also travels through familiar poetic pastures. A number of these poems are ekphrastic, and a good amount, including the first poem in the collection and the title poem, are ars poetica. In that poem, “Ars Poetica,” in addition to describing the power of poetry itself as a genre, it appears as Shapiro lays forth his own poetic intent for this book. “Open your ears and build a language,” he declares. And “shout names for new things.” And this open invitation, “Let’s go for a ride into language, / circling round and round. / Where a poem will explode from its center.”

Explode, these poems do. Perhaps the best example is the poem “Netherland” which considers in-between places, for example, the “space between the lightning flash and thunder”; the “space between the shot and its recoil”; “[b]etween the siren and its arrival,” etc.

This is for me, the most ambitious poem here, for in these in-between moments, Shapiro finds everything from an ethereal icicle wind chime to a “sea [that] unwrinkles into calm” to a dead child, to an ambulance arriving too late, all netted in in-between places. Lovers, in this poem, “trade their vows and limbs in burning rooms,” and “[m]ushrooms blossom in the peat of canopy firs.” He delivers up a gorgeous montage of sorrow, fury and light.

The eleven-page title poem, “Child with...