Tantalus in Love Poems Author:Alan Shapiro Kingsley Tufts Award winner Alan Shapiro is at his most passionate in this new collection full of life, jealousy, lust, and romantic abandon. — Tantalus in Love begins with the disintegration of a marriage, with anger and suspicion. But from sorrow Shapiro moves to celebrate the resilience of love after loss, and the awakening glory of an amorous... more » middle age. In "Invocation" he writes, "Love . . . let there be never again / a moment in which / your sudden shining isn't / sudden." These poems yearn with hesitant love, heated at renewal, fragile but intensified by past experience of love"s evanescence and uncertainty. "Iris / love flower of the middle-aged . . . the stalk / bends under the unexpected weight . . . how did I ever live without you?" Tantalus in Love reinvents myth and symbol in lyrical portraits of astounding resonance, illuminating this defining vulnerability of humanity.« less