Gerald 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.
"Singing songs/about the ruins or the exile," gentle as "the rose that waits," a post-Auschwitz Ezekiel, Stern (Bread Without Sugar, LJ 3/15/92) composes long, difficult poems that defy reason but stir the imagination. With bizarre tension they end up where they start, craving mercy, illuminating "dreary mysteries" of memory. In each poem, seeking direction, objects exploding around him, Stern wrestles pieces of incomprehensible destiny into harmony, surging between everyday and the ineffable. Reading Odd Mercy (one poem, "Hot Dog," is over 40 pages) is like wandering in a wonderful forest, then feeling the immense relief of returning home. It's vexatious and magical at the same time. Fruit, stone, wind, and wheat are Old Testament-like symbols of holiness, and shapes of a ruined land have something to do with the riddle of how soul is trapped within heavy flesh. Afraid of displacement, Stern takes delight in old, sad wisdom. For over two decades, no one has equaled his compassionate, surreal parables about the burden of and the exaltation at being alive. Highly recommended.‘Frank Allen, West Virginia State Coll., Institute
Stern's inner world is so capacious that the poems that pour forth from it are not easily categorized. These new pieces, which are centered primarily in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, are built of meditation, narration and a pastoral lyricism that turns Gotham into a garden. Stern's visions take shape in the form of bluebirds and sunflowers, sofas and Hondas. And ghosts. Ancestors and Judaic brethren invoke a heritage of suffering throughout, yielding an exquisite melancholy. Also present is Walt Whitman, a secular‘even pagan‘presence whose vigorous influence is keenly felt as Stern nurtures bucolic verse, sometimes writing from a bug or a bird's eye view. Among this selection's opening salvo of 22 poems, most notable is ``Ida,'' a stunning Kaddish for his mother. The book's second half is comprised of a long poem in 17 sections. Titled ``Hot Dog,'' the street name of a homeless woman whom Stern watches over, the work is an encyclopedic rumination on body and spirit. (Sept.)
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