The Spirit of Wagner Award

Carrying the Flame

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Poetry

The table is already in motion

Welcome to Georgia Shreve’s chamber of lyric and light — a place where each poem glows with clarity, tension, and thought.

Over the course of her career, Georgia Shreve has written more than two-hundred-and-seventy-five poems, many of them so carefully
constructed, so sharply intimate, that they feel less like poetry and more like artifact — discoveries excavated from the self. Her themes are vast: grief, absurdity, aging, desire, loss, memory, the cruelty of beauty, the violence of restraint. But her form is always distilled, intentional. There are no excesses here. Only pressure. Precision. And clarity.

Georgia’s poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The New Criterion, Poetry Magazine, and The New Republic — an extraordinary editorial sweep that places her among the rarest echelon of contemporary voices. Her poems don’t fit neatly in any one camp; instead, they orbit a space entirely her own — one where elegance and intellect meet emotional risk.

Some of these works live on the page. Others have been set to music and performed by world-class ensembles in multimedia concerts at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, National Sawdust, and beyond. They are read, sung, seen. The boundaries are porous. Georgia moves between disciplines without fanfare — but always with craft.

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Original Works

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Poetry

by Georgia

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Poetry
Mother in the Snow
In “Mother in the Snow,” Georgia Shreve turns a winter stumble into a piercing portrait of maternal endurance under watchful eyes. Dark humor and raw imagery reveal a woman improvising her way forward while trying to hold dignity, and herself, together.
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Poetry
No Pity for Pigeons
In “No Pity for Pigeons,” Georgia Shreve transforms a quiet park encounter into a piercing social portrait of class, displacement, and human vulnerability. What begins with birds and cake ends with a deeper grief: not for pigeons, but for people quietly pushed to the margins of the worlds they once called ordinary.
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Poetry
You, we, I
In “You, We, I,” Shreve turns pronouns into emotional architecture, mapping how intimacy moves between fusion and fracture. With spare, incantatory lines, the poem captures two people reaching for truth through glare, innocence, and uncertainty, before landing on a haunting final shift from “we” back to “I.”
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Poetry
New Life
In “New Life,” Shreve imagines reinvention as metalwork: each day newly minted, each love a chance to re-stamp the self. Through images of repaired bridges, open doors, and an untouched bed, the poem captures the vulnerable mechanics of beginning again without denying what came before.
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Poetry
Is There a Poem in the House?
In “Is There a Poem in the House?”, Shreve turns inspiration into a haunting presence that seeps through walls, books, and breath before vanishing again. By merging domestic imagery with artistic dread, the poem captures the fragile cycle of creative arrival and loss with wit, unease, and precision.
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Poetry
Intimate Transmissions
In “Intimate Transmissions,” Shreve reimagines longing as signal and occupation, where desire arrives as pulse, implant, and interference rather than romance at a distance. Erotic, unsettling, and darkly funny, the poem traces how intimacy can slip from invitation into control while still feeling impossible to refuse.
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Poetry
Spotless
In “Spotless,” Shreve turns a household cleaning ritual into a darkly comic portrait of control, scrutiny, and emotional concealment. As the speaker prepares for an impossible inspector, the poem reveals that what gets hidden is not dirt but selfhood, ending on a chilling truth: one can be judged constantly and still remain unseen.
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Poetry
Foreign City
In “Foreign City,” Shreve transforms hometown streets into a brief dream of elsewhere, layering the ordinary with European aura, appetite, and cinematic glamour. The poem’s final turn, abrupt urban sound returning the speaker to Cleveland, reveals how quickly perception can mythologize place, and how suddenly reality reasserts its voice.
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Short Stories
The Countess of M—
In nineteenth-century France, a sheltered aristocratic daughter enters a secret romance with a fallen nobleman, discovering both the thrill of being chosen and the cost of defying the social order around her.
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Plays
The Odds
A darkly funny three-scene play about two sisters who grow up treating family dysfunction like a math problem. Ten years later, memory returns with teeth, and “the odds” becomes the name for what was hidden in plain sight.
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Short Stories
The Enigma Variations
In “The Enigma Variations,” a daughter chronicles her composer mother’s brilliance and unraveling as harassment, domestic pressure, and illness sever her from the piano that defines her life. Expansive, intimate, and devastating, the story is both elegy and indictment, revealing how a creative life can be erased long before death.
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Operas and Musicals
Enron
In “Enron,” Georgia Shreve turns corporate collapse into biting music-theater satire, following Carol Sidney as loyalty, ambition, and conscience collide. With sharp tonal shifts and escalating moral pressure, the work reveals how institutional fraud is sustained not by one villain, but by a culture of performance, fear, and strategic silence.
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Songs and Instrumental Music
Margaret
A Carnegie Hall-premiered (2010) and recorded (2010) tenor-and-piano setting of Hopkins’s “Spring and Fall,” "Margaret" transforms a child’s grief over autumn leaves into a spare, piercing meditation on mortality, memory, and the first knowledge of loss.
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Songs and Instrumental Music
Fantasia on Celtic Themes
Premiered at Carnegie Hall in 2015, "Fantasia on Celtic Themes" reworks traditional Celtic songs for soprano, tenor, and baritone, turning folk material into a cohesive dramatic journey of longing, love, and ritual memory.
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Songs and Instrumental Music
Easter 1916
In "Easter 1916," Georgia Shreve sets W.B. Yeats for soprano, tenor, baritone, and chamber orchestra, transforming a canonical political poem into a layered vocal drama of witness, grief, and historical change. Premiered at Weill Recital Hall, Carnegie Hall (May 2017), the work’s recurring refrain, “A terrible beauty is born,” evolves from observation into moral reckoning with each return.
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Multimedia Music
Four Seasons
In "Four Seasons" (2018), Georgia Shreve pairs her Piano Concerto with Halstead Wells’s time-lapse film of Manhattan terraces, transforming New York’s changing weather into a synchronized orchestral-visual journey. Premiered at Zankel Hall, Carnegie Hall, the work offers a lyrical study of urban beauty, temporal flux, and hard-won optimism.
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