A book of essays by one of the most celebrated American poets of the last fifty years, "A Dress Rehearsal for the Truth" is part memoir and part literary exploration. In the autobiographical essays, Alan Shapiro tells of his Jewish childhood in Boston in the 1950s, narrates the events of his youth that made him pivot from aspiring to be a professional basketball player to wanting to write poetry, and relates how family tragedy forced him to use his personal sorrow as fuel to create personal meaning and beauty. In the literary essays, Shapiro explores poems by others which he admires and addresses the uneasy tension between being a poet and working as a professional academic. Finally, in a wonderful fictional dialogue with the spirit of his friend and poet-colleague C.K. Williams, Shapiro examines the poet's creative process, the changing ways in which great poets of the past are viewed, and the poet's place in the modern world.
In reviewing the collection, Rosanna Warren writes "I was gripped by these essays as if by a fine novel. Through scene after scene--mourning a dying sister and a poet friend, celebrating poems he loves--Alan Shapiro threads grief, savage humor, irony, self-deprecation, artistic urgency, and delicacy of feeling. Every page is quick with radiant intelligence."
Another reviewing poet and scholar, Honor Moore, calls the book "a bountiful and imaginative collection" and writes that "Alan Shapiro rehearses what is remembered at the heart of his poem-making. Crowing this marvelous book is a tour de force--a waking dream of the ghost of Charlie Williams, poet, friend, and interlocutor of an entire writing life--a twinned dialogue on poetics that delights as it brilliantly instructs."
