“His best poems come when he looks into his own heart, then explores how that heart—a poet’s heart—can encompass a nation.”
The New York Times
“Shaw‘s Solving for X in both execution and subject matter displays the sensibility of one who has thought long and productively about his craft.... Shaw‘s talent shines forth powerfully.”
Pleiades
“Robert Shaw's world is one in which human effort—in the garden, the workplace, the home, the soul—is always imperfect, but always forgiven. Although the voice is dependable, Shaw’s images repeatedly surprise: for instance, the hammer and nails of a man tacking up a Christmas garland, which metamorphose into Instruments of the Passion.… When Shaw finds, at the bottom of a wishing well, a ‘copper-scaled leviathan,’ I find myself wishing I’d thought of that—and of so much else in this excellent book.”
Mary Jo Salter
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.”
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). More info →
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Release date: December 2002
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Nostos
By V. Penelope Pelizzon
In choosing the winning manuscript for the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, judge Andrew Hudgins remarked: “With immense poetic verve, Pelizzon finds flamboyance in places where it has been forgotten and brings it back to vivid life—and she sees it for what it is. Her vision is then both passionate and dispassionate at the same time, a maturity of perspective that is just one of the many accomplishments of this superb first book.”In
The Optimist
Poems
By Joshua Mehigan
In Joshua Mehigan’s award-winning poetry, one encounters a lucid, resolute vision driven by an amazing facility with the metrical line. Most of the poems in The Optimist unapologetically employ traditional poetic technique, and, in each of these, Mehigan stretches the fabric of living language over a framework of regular meter to produce a compelling sonic counterpoint.The
Poems Old and New, 1918-1978
By Janet Lewis
Kenneth Rexroth wrote: “Janet Lewis uses reason to veil and adorn the flesh of feeling and intuition. This is the way the greatest poetry has always been written.”The poems in this collection range over a period of 60 years. The style is spare, direct, cutting to the core of subject. Richness of intelligence and a concern for the human has also characterized every phase of Lewis’ development.
