"After the Digging" provides an exceptional look at the early work of
acclaimed poet Alan Shapiro. His first collection of poems allows
readers to realize his strong sense of historical narrative and gives
them reference on how to read his later poems. Inspired by his time at
Stanford in the late seventies, the book is divided into two parts: the
first is a sequence on the Irish Famine in the mid-nineteenth century;
the second, a series on demonic possession in late seventeenth-century
New England. These poems give voice to the pain and delusion of those
from other periods and inevitably recall the many evils of our own
century.
"Powerful. . . . That a young poet can handle this subject so well in a
first book is . . . a pleasure in itself."--Robert von Hallberg,
"Contemporary Literature," 1981