Review by Booklist Review
Stern writes with a gruff, seen-it-all knowingness and with the distillation, leaps, and pivots acquired over a long life of poetic practice. His eyes are drawn to the muck and dust of the trampled world, the aging machinery of progress, the sagging porch, the dying tree, the fog and mist of confusion and fatigue. Stern unabashedly loves beauty and all of creation, but in his fifteenth collection, even the animals are aggressive, needy, or suffer pointless deaths. Stern is funny, mad for life, respectful of death, and jazzed by shared ideas. In the long, gnashing, reorienting dialogic poem The Preacher, a response to the book of Ecclesiastes, the poet and his friend Peter consider Stern's vision of a hole in the universe, and his poetic process: My figures / always start with the literal and the spreading / is like blood spreading. His wound is our propensity for lying, killing, and destroying the living earth. In his vision of the future, love will be found in a sewer, winds and waters will rise, the poet will sing, and we will dance on.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2008 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Honored for his plainspoken, blue-collar manner--its honesty, and the literary learning it belies--Stern, born in 1925, is now writing his strongest, strangest poems. Like 2005's Everything Is Burning, this collection displays passionate attachments--to daily pleasures, poets living and dead whom Stern has befriended (especially in a warm elegy for William Matthews) and memory itself. In 1946, one poem remembers, "I was a bellows/ and one by one my lungs were ruined but I wouldn't/ change my life, what for?" The short poems mostly comprise single, extended sentences, piling up Stern's gruff loves and recollections faster than death and old age can knock them down: a poem about a weather vane finds Stern "amazed/ that we could last the way we do compared to/ birds just blown by the wind." The scenes in this 17th collection come from his youth in Philadelphia and New York City, and from exurban New Jersey, where he lives now. The final section, a long poem in dialogue form entitled "The Preacher," imagines a conversation with the younger poet Peter Richards, whose subjects include Kant, Mingus, the uses of anger and the variety of wildflowers; it may not stick in many readers' memories, but the short poems before it certainly will. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
"She was a darling with her roses, though what I/ like is lavender for I can dry it and/ nothing is blue like that,/ so here I am,/ in my arms a bouquet of tragic lavender,/ the whole history of Southern France against my/ chest." Stern (This Time) has become a master of rich, intimately personal poems that strike at universal chords but do so with surprise, intelligence, and wry humor. With a deft though sometimes mischievous hand, he crafts scenes that are at once exotic and familiar: "He was dead so he was only a puff/ of smoke at the most and I had to labor to see him/ or just to hear and when we spoke it was as/ if we were waiting in the rain together." The short, personal lyrics in the first two sections are balanced against a long poem of meditation, "The Preacher," which begins with the book of Ecclesiastes and in dialog, real and imagined, with his friend Peter and considers loss, futility, and emptiness, the "hole" that exists when what was is not anymore: "As if the one tree you love so well and hardly/ can embrace it is so huge so that with-/ out it there might be a hole in the universe/ explains how the killing of any one thing can/ likewise make a hole." Highly recommended.--Louis McKee, Painted Bride Arts Ctr., Philadelphia (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
