That Said: New and Selected Poems - Tapa dura

“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.

“Jane Shore's That Said: New and Selected Poems represents the idiom of a recovery, a reconstituting of a personal past in a collective of fully realized, richly addressed moments, beautifully and indelibly spoken in its larger claims on the quotidian, ranging in insight from playing the good child-mother to "Thumbelina" to being the bad child to her own mother, calling her, "under my breath," "Mrs. Hitler." Shore's poem-narratives have long been praised for their juxtapositions of wit with quiet wisdom. Yet her poems of these past three and a half decades also speak through a Talmudic knowledge as ancient as the archetype. Her work is deep because its small worlds become so whole, exacting, and inclusive.” — Stanley Plumly