That Said: New and Selected Poems - Couverture rigide

Finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award - Music Minus OneWinner of the Juniper Prize - Eye Level Winner of the Lamont Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets - The Minute HandWinner of the Poets Prize - A Yes-or-Now Answer Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Arts, and Radcliffe Bunting Institute fellowships

Praise for A Yes-or-No Answer

"Jane Shore’s incandescent language lights up everything equally . . . Her memories become my memories, help me recover what I’ve misplaced." —Rachel Hadas

 

"All of us women have been daughters. Many of us have been mothers and even grandmothers. Our albums are full of aunts and uncles, fathers, grandfathers, other relatives. This is the raw material of Shore's poems. Their grammar is simple, seemingly artless. But the finished products are complex, burnished with feeling and send an elemental shiver along the reader's spine that announces, this is real art." —Maxine Kumin

 

"In her new collection of poetry, A Yes-or-No Answer, Jane Shore comes to realize that the yes or no answers, the certainty and truth that we all wish for, will never be readily available. With this recognition, Shore wisely confronts the past and the present with a marvelously searching eye, her poems, by turns, honest, humorous, and wrenching. Jane Shore is, without question, one of our best and most perceptive chroniclers of family life." —Elizabeth Spires

 

"As Shore writes in one poem, 'Life's full of little ambushes,' and Jane Shore's poems do not spare us or protect us from those ambushes. Instead, she is the poet of those little ambushes, moments that hold us hostage, moments when we come to life—how could we have forgotten to remember!—moments full of lively quirks and quick studies, of quandaries and questions. There are no yes-or-no answers,perhaps no answers at all except the soothing cooling balm of companionable poems like hers." —Julia Alvarez

 

"How can a book recounting losses, particularly of family members—Mother, Father, Aunt Sadie, an ever-growing roster—be so cheering? Jane Shore’laughing-through-tears sensibility has never been more winning than in A Yes-or-No Answer." —Mary Jo Salter

 

"Throughout the course of her distinguished career, Jane Shore has been likened—for the clarity of her observsations and her formally delicate, narrative ease—to her mentor Elizabeth Bishop. Yet never has the comparison been more appropriate." —David St. John

“Jane Shore is the poet of little ambushes, moments that hold us hostage, moments when we come to life.” — Julia Alvarez

Since Robert Fitzgerald praised Eye Level, Jane Shore’s 1977 Juniper Prize–winning first collection, for its “cool but venturesome eye,” her work has continued to receive the highest accolades and attention from critics and fellow poets. That Said: New and Selected Poems extends Shore’s lifelong, vivid exploration of memory—her childhood in New Jersey, her Jewish heritage, her adult years in Vermont. Shore’s devotion to her familiar coterie of departed parents, aunts, uncles, and friends passionately subscribes to Sholem Aleichem’s dictum that “eternity resides in the past.”

United States Poet Laureate W. S. Merwin wrote, “Shore’s characters emerge with an etched clarity . . . She performs this summoning with a language of quiet directness, grace and exactness, clear and without affectations.” And while there is no “typical” Jane Shore poem, what unifies them is her bittersweet introspection, elegant restraint, provocative autobiography, and on every page a magnetic readability.