After the Digging

Alan Shapiro's "Mixed Company" won the 1996 Los Angeles Times Award for Poetry, and one of his volumes of memoirs "The Last Happy Occasion" was a finalist for the 1996 National Book Critics Circle Award.

These early poems by Alan Shapiro give readers reference on how to read his later poems. The work comprises a sequence on the Irish Famine, and a series on demonic possession in late-17th-century New England. The poems give voice to the pain and delusion of those from other times.After the Digging provides an exceptional look at the early work of acclaimed poet Alan Shapiro. His first collection of poems allows readers to realize his strong sense of historical narrative and gives them reference on how to read his later poems. Inspired by his time at Stanford in the late seventies, the book is divided into two parts: the first is a sequence on the Irish Famine in the mid-nineteenth century; the second, a series on demonic possession in late seventeenth-century New England. These poems give voice to the pain and delusion of those from other periods and inevitably recall the many evils of our own century. "Powerful...That a young poet can handle this subject so well in a first book is ...a pleasure in itself."--Robert von Hallberg, Contemporary Literature, 1981