For an American poet of Shapiro's generation—that of Jarrell and Schwartz and Lowell and Berryman and Roethke—survival is quite a feat. His progress …, which entailed at various points revolts against formalism and academicism (the exigencies of "rime," T. S. Eliot, the Eastern critical establishment, the Englishness of the English language, and so forth), turns out to be a good thing, hygienically speaking. And it hasn't even lost him points as a poet. For the very latest [groups of poems] included in [Collected Poems: 1940–1978], Adult Bookstore, has some of the most sharply observed, satirically barbed and muscularly formed poems he has ever written. There is also here a stunning battle poem about the death of the great Japanese warship, The Yamoto, in April, 1945. It's laid out something like a Victorian ode (viz., Tennyson's stanzas on the death of the Duke of Wellington) and even more recalls the...