The Last Happy Occasion

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The Last Happy Occasion is the coming-of-age story of an American Jew and aspiring writer in the sixties and seventies. It tells how poetry taught him to read his own and other people's lives, and how those lives in turn shaped his understanding of certain poems. A memoir in six movements, the book opens with "In Awkward Reverence", Shapiro's account of how he came to terms with the Judaism of his childhood through (of all things) Philip Larkin's poem "Church Going". In "Woodstock Puritan", Shapiro recalls his adolescent battles with his father, his loss of a close friend to the counterculture, and the importance of Thom Gunn's poetry in helping him make sense of the sixties. But poetry isn't always a good thing, as Shapiro learned when his insatiable literary passions cost him his marriage shortly after college (as told in "Come Live with Me"), and when his devotion to the poetry and moral perfectionism of Yvor Winters during his graduate years at Stanford came to mirror the fundamentalist leanings of a friend who had become a Hasidic Jew ("Fanatics"). In the remaining chapters, Shapiro shows how these events, along with pivotal life changes including the death of his sister, caused him to reconsider the transformative power of art and accept the limitations of poetry in confronting the untransformable pain of mortal loss.