Review: The Watering Hole can t quite quench a thirst
This Room Is a Broken Heart, part of The Watering Hole, in the lobby of Pershing Square Signature Center in New York, June 25, 2021. The Watering Hole is a theatrical installation conceived and curated by the Pulitzer Prize-winner Lynn Nottage and Miranda Haymon. Sara Krulwich/The New York Times.
by Maya Phillips
(NYT NEWS SERVICE)
.- The day I went to the Signature Theatre, it was so hellishly hot out that it felt as if the air was clinging to my skin. So I stepped into the air-conditioned coolness of the Pershing Square Signature Center in Manhattan for The Watering Hole, a theatrical installation conceived and curated by Pulitzer Prize-winner Lynn Nottage and Miranda Haymon.
Pick up a book of contemporary poetry, and you are likely to find either personal recollections, observations of nature, a focus on race or sexuality or melancholy introspection. You are not likely to find references to councilmen on the take, polluted rivers, financial speculation and continuous war.
Popular Longing
, the third and latest book of poetry by Natalie Shapero, contains all these things. Its reflection of contemporary social reality, and of the effects that this reality has on our personal lives, is bracingly vivid.
Difficult to find in
Popular Longing is any endorsement of identity politics. The universities (where most contemporary poets have careers) strongly promote this reactionary tendency as part of “progressive” politics. Although she teaches at Tufts University in the Boston area, Shapero does not follow this trend.
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New & Noteworthy Poetry, From Beethoven to Armageddon
March 2, 2021
Recent poetry of interest:
WOUND FROM THE MOUTH OF A WOUND: Poems, by torrin a. greathouse. (Milkweed, paper, $16.) The poems in this debut collection methodically subvert traditional notions of beauty, to show how they leave no room for a “transgender cripple-punk” like the author.
POPULAR LONGING, by Natalie Shapero. (Copper Canyon, paper, $17.) Shapero’s giddy, acerbic work is alert to the comedy of disconnection; in one poem, the speaker assumes that a recent restaurant boom is evidence that people “want new spots to fight, to squall / and snipe, lose their appetites.”
BEETHOVEN VARIATIONS: Poems on a Life, by Ruth Padel. (Knopf, $27.) Padel, whose previous collections include a verse biography of Darwin, here gives Beethoven the same treatment, summoning his “holy zone / of concentration” where “three descending semitones / say there is answer in the world.”