North Shore

Advance Praise

Divinity, poker, masculinity, narrative, the vicissitudes of memory, the sharpening contrast between the realm of spirit (aniconic, in Jewish tradition) and the reality of bodies, hands, baseballs and footballs, white matter, gray matter, imperfect recall and stop-less decay: Caplan’s new collection has everything, elegantly and clearly arranged into poems of adult grief and childhood returned, poems—moreover—that see (as Emily Dickinson put it) New Englandly. Think late Kunitz, and then early Heaney. “Old joke, right you are again, with your sly / evasions and omissions,” Caplan tells his imaginary Moishe, on the way to addressing his real grief for his real father. It’s all real, and scary, and homey, and full of salt air, and cupolas, and families, oriented, disoriented, accurate, and—in the words of another great precedent for these finely crafted American poems—“lost, unhappy, and at home,” amid (to quote Caplan himself) “the indecorous roar of life.”
—Stephanie Burt, Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English, Harvard University

Yes, the pain of loss is memorialized in musical lines of David Caplan’s beautiful new book, North Shore, but why then do these same lines burst with the joy of story-telling? Perhaps because this is a book of a grieving son who brings his father to life in these pages with much skill, gusto, and style. As he writes in the terrific lyric poem in the midst of the collection, “Pizzeria,” one can be awestruck by style. I know I was when reading these poems. Caplan has made a collection of lyrics that are both elegies and a hymn to a life shimmering to the brim with love—not the show off kind, but kind keeps the music real.
— Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa

“How much of life is inherited?” A father’s death brings this question home. David Caplan’s North Shore offers a ramifying exploration of grief—a rich, moving inquiry grounded in Jewish mourning traditions. Biking the causeway, listening to ballgames (Patriots or the Sox), walking the Fens, invoking Tom Brady, the poet vividly conjures the suburban Boston of his youth and explores what it means to return. One might think of Robert Lowell’s Life Studies, or Robert Frost’s North of Boston. Like his predecessors, Caplan takes the measure of his inheritance and limns the specifics of place in a lean, assured vernacular. Yet Caplan’s poems show how one might be from but not of the North Shore—its clubs and memberships, its deacons and “old patriots’ mansions.” Bracingly attentive, Caplan gives us a stationed poetry—grounding itself firmly yet delicately in memory, landscape, seascape, Jewish ritual. Ritual gives a shape to time and experience; so too these poems. North Shore derives its considerable power in part from what one might call its ferocious tact: the poet’s unsparing yet subtle reckoning with himself as well as his father and his father’s decline, the complexities of grief and regret and of the layerings of the self. And amidst this grief—part of its texture—are “jokes and stories, the indecorous roar of life everywhere in the house.” This is a book both of remembrance and of tribute, reminding us of—and wonderfully sustaining—the oldest functions of poetry: to make memorable in language, to praise.
—Maureen N. McLane, author of My Poetics