Everything Is Burning

by Gerald Stern

Overview

"Ruthless and occasionally outrageous, Stern's literary songs are sharp, surprising, and unerring in their delivery."—Ploughshares, Editor's Choice

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393329162
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	12/17/2006
Pages:	98
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Gerald Stern (1925—2022), the author of nineteen volumes of poetry, was awarded the National Book Award, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the National Jewish Book Award, and the Wallace Stevens Award, among many other honors.

Editorial Reviews

"Stern’s unadorned craftsmanship has few rivals in American letters."

Philadelphia Inquirer

"Crackles with . . . exuberance, impatience, and an apparently consuming need."

San Francisco Chronicle

Rather than, say, Illuminated? Forceful lines, brief lyric units and a sense of urgency make this 15th book from the much-honored Stern (American Sonnets, etc.) his most powerful new verse for a long while. As he has done before, Stern builds free verse around incidents from his own life and from his Jewish-American heritage. This time, however, the incidents go by much faster, and the tones include not his usual equable melancholy but anger, joy, uncertainty, frustration. One poem introduces "Me and my critic, me and my wife, a dog that/ doesn't love me"; another concludes, "let love take place/ in old cars, let them line up at the curb/ in Lovers' Lane and let the voyeurs go/ from car to car with flashlights." Sometimes just one sentence long, or one run-on nonsentence, the poems cover not only Stern's own experiences, but his impressions of heroes and antiheroes-Plath and Pound, Damon Runyon and Jack Ruby ("one of the wild Jews from East Dallas"). "How short it is, and raw and honest," he says in "Original Stern Country," one of a few poems that double as manifestos: his short, rough work fits especially well with the raw grief that emerges toward the end of the book, in the disturbing, and moving, "My Sister's Funeral." (June) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

With his 15th poetry collection, Stern, now an octogenarian, continues in the unique voice fostered in his first volume, Pineys (1971). Poems pick up in the middle of a monolog ("Thought" begins: "After he left I turned to my cold soup/ for I was starving after so much talk") and Stern leaves little room for reflection. Run-on words and sparse punctuation seem to implore the reader to hurry. There's only one poem here with stanza breaks (the final and perhaps weakest one). The best are the ones that turn surreal before your eyes and compel rereading, as with "So one day when the azalea bush was firing/ away and the Japanese maple was roaring I/ came into the kitchen full of daylight and/ turned on my son's Sony." This is surrealism coupled with restraint; despite his rush, Stern is still holding on to the reins. But be warned: Just as you get your bearing, he takes off in a different direction. While this book might mystify the casual reader, those who truly appreciate poetry won't want to miss it.-Rochelle Ratner, formerly with Soho Weekly News, New York Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal