Gerald Stern

Gerald Stern calls upon his own life as a ground for his poems. Showing a horror of lies, treachery, and war, he offers redemption through stark language and plain speech.

The author says in his introduction: "These aphorisms, petite narratives, whatever they are, were written over a period of two weeks in the Spring of 2002. They represent my feelings during that time, feelings that were angry, arch, focused, political, and unified. They also reflect both my reading and the sheer accident of my experience."

In a series of freewheeling rambles that combine autobiography and meditation, Gerald Stern explores significant and representative events in his life. He describes the dour Sundays of Calvinist Pittsburgh, punctuated by his parents' weekly battles. We have glimpses of him as a wilderness camp counselor, and later, having been declared 4-F, as a postwar draftee (a stint that includes jail). In the 1950s he savors the romance of Paris. Stern also tells of being shot in Newark—the bullet is still in his neck to prove it. Other scenes include being mistaken for Allen Ginsberg and encounters with Andy Warhol. And in the ineffably tender "The Ring," Stern recalls his mother's second engagement ring, "when they were a bit richer, if a bit broader and a bit more weary." As in his poetry, Stern discovers his subject as he goes along, relishing that discovery and expanding on it. There is no other voice like Gerald Stern's, funny and reflective and opinionated—and forgiving.

In his thirteenth collection, the 1998 National Book Award winner presents us with fifty-nine "Stern Sonnets," of twenty or so lines rather than the traditional fourteen. Using the events of his life as starting points, Gerald Stern deals with time and loss, with the dichotomy of light and darkness, and—always—with the possibility of joy. This stunning collection moves from autobiography to the visionary in surges of memory and language that draw the reader from one poem to the next.

Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.