The Last Happy Occasion - Hardcover

The Last Happy Occasion is the coming-of-age story of an American Jew and aspiring writer in the sixties and seventies. In this memoir in six movements, Alan Shapiro recalls how poetry helped him make sense of his own and other people's lives. Events unfold, including his sister's death, that make him reconsider the transformative power of art and accept the limitations of poetry in confronting the untransformable pain of mortal loss. A refreshingly honest, lovingly crafted work, The Last Happy Occasion is a treasure map for anyone interested in exploring the intersections of life and art. "[Shapiro] seeks what lies at the deepest level of the human heart to mitigate his--and our--separateness from others."--Chase Collins, Chicago Tribune Books "Shapiro, not unlike Auden, doses his wordplay with a certain sly irony...We come away from Shapiro's book with an intimate appreciation of the little subversions that poetry can work in one's life."--Jonathan Kirsch, Los Angeles Times "The Last Happy Occasion is touching and intelligent, emotionally satisfying and eloquent testimony to the power of poetry to instruct, heal and inspire." --Emily Barton, New York Times Book Review "The literary criticism is sharp, but what enthralls the reader more is Shapiro's humorous but honest perspective on his younger self, a perspective that is critical without being condescending."--Heller McAlpin, Newsday "He is an acute observer of moments, people, art and language. And he packs even seemingly simple stories with many layers of meaning...He shows us the power and importance of transformative art in life."--Publishers Weekly, starred review

The Last Happy Occasion is the coming-of-age story of an American Jew and aspiring writer in the sixties and seventies. It tells how poetry taught him to read his own and other people's lives, and how those lives in turn shaped his understanding of certain poems. A memoir in six movements, the book opens with "In Awkward Reverence", Shapiro's account of how he came to terms with the Judaism of his childhood through (of all things) Philip Larkin's poem "Church Going". In "Woodstock Puritan", Shapiro recalls his adolescent battles with his father, his loss of a close friend to the counterculture, and the importance of Thom Gunn's poetry in helping him make sense of the sixties. But poetry isn't always a good thing, as Shapiro learned when his insatiable literary passions cost him his marriage shortly after college (as told in "Come Live with Me"), and when his devotion to the poetry and moral perfectionism of Yvor Winters during his graduate years at Stanford came to mirror the fundamentalist leanings of a friend who had become a Hasidic Jew ("Fanatics"). In the remaining chapters, Shapiro shows how these events, along with pivotal life changes including the death of his sister, caused him to reconsider the transformative power of art and accept the limitations of poetry in confronting the untransformable pain of mortal loss.