Paperback : HK$200.00
"This healthy collection of new poems and selections from seven previous volumes is remarkable for its generosity of spirit, manifested in a warm surrealism that is often turned with humor toward his own past as a way of understanding the recurrent questions of growing old: 'Why did it take so long / for me to get lenient? What does it mean one life / only?' " - Publishers Weekly (starred review) "Gerald Stern's achievement is immense. In this beautiful gathering . . . one encounters a poet who praises and mourns in turn and even at once." - Grace Schulman, The Nation "Stern is one of those rare poetic souls who makes it almost impossible to remember what our world was like before his poetry came to exalt it." - C. K. Williams
Gerald Stern, the author of nineteen poetry collections, has won the National Book Award, the National Jewish Book Award, the Ruth Lilly Prize, the Wallace Stevens Award, the Frost medal, and the Award of Merit (from the American Academy of Arts and Letters), among others. He lives in Lambertville, New Jersey, and New York City.
Show more"This healthy collection of new poems and selections from seven previous volumes is remarkable for its generosity of spirit, manifested in a warm surrealism that is often turned with humor toward his own past as a way of understanding the recurrent questions of growing old: 'Why did it take so long / for me to get lenient? What does it mean one life / only?' " - Publishers Weekly (starred review) "Gerald Stern's achievement is immense. In this beautiful gathering . . . one encounters a poet who praises and mourns in turn and even at once." - Grace Schulman, The Nation "Stern is one of those rare poetic souls who makes it almost impossible to remember what our world was like before his poetry came to exalt it." - C. K. Williams
Gerald Stern, the author of nineteen poetry collections, has won the National Book Award, the National Jewish Book Award, the Ruth Lilly Prize, the Wallace Stevens Award, the Frost medal, and the Award of Merit (from the American Academy of Arts and Letters), among others. He lives in Lambertville, New Jersey, and New York City.
Show moreGerald Stern is the author of the National Book Award-winning This Time, the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize-winning Early Selected Poems, and other books. He has also been awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the National Jewish Book Award, and the Wallace Stevens Award, among many other honors. He lives in Lambertville, New Jersey.
At once self-involved and sympathetic, Stern catalogues with wry dexterity a vast range of sensory data and cultural detritus, always united by "women and men of all sizes and all ages/ living together, without satire." This healthy collection of new poems and selections from his seven previous volumes (Odd Mercy, etc.) is remarkable for its generosity of spirit, manifested in a warm surrealism that is often turned with humor toward his own past ("My great specialty was darkness then/ and radiant sexual energy") as a way of understanding the recurrent questions of growing old: "Why did it take so long/ for me to get lenient? What does it mean one life/ only?" The greatest joy here lies in the excellence of Stern's longer sentences, which recall Whitman in their life-like pulse and flow, in their subtle verbal patternings that submerge rhetorical artifice beneath the breath of actual speech. Stern's closing assessment of his poem "Your Animal" is indicative of the ethics of the volume as a whole: "It is my poem against the starving heart./ It is my victory over meanness." When the poet warns, "Nothing is too small for my sarcasm," the counsel is a false snare; irony is not sarcasm, and it is Stern's ironic voice that allows for "some understanding, some surcease,/ some permanence" without lapsing into lyric sentimentality. (June)
|
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
|
