In Beauty Bright

by Gerald Stern

Overview

“The work of an American master.”—World Literature Today

The lyric poems of In Beauty Bright, although marked by the same passion and swiftness as Gerald Stern’s previous work, move into an area of knowledge—even wisdom—that reflects a long life of writing, teaching, and activism. They are poems of grief and anger, but the music is delicate and moving.

from "In Beauty Bright":

In beauty-bright and such it was like Blake’s
lily and though an angel he looked absurd
dragging a lily out of a beauty-bright store
wrapped in tissue with a petal drooping,
nor was it useless—you who know it know
how useful it is—and how he would be dead
in a minute if he were to lose it though
how do you lose a lily?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393089752
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	08/27/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	96
File size:	878 KB

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

This late collection—Stern is 87—is an astonishing addition to the canon of a poet whose status as a major figure is already assured. Like the late poems of Wallace Stevens, the poems here display the poet’s gifts by taking another step into the empyrean of sheer mastery. One such gift is Stern’s syntactical momentum: lines propel themselves forward, phrases tumbling with sloppy grace: “In beauty bright and such it was like Blake’s/ lily and though an angel he looked absurd/ dragging a lily out of a beauty bright store/ wrapped in tissue.” Another is the way poems burst forth, borne on tiny prepositional capes: “In the way Ovid lectured,” “How God in three religions rode,” “Then, fifty dollars for a Hungarian.” A third is Stern’s command of a dozen registers—dream logic, contemplation, reference, remembrance—woven in endlessly surprising, undulating sentences. These poems contain multitudes, but a long memory is perhaps most conspicuously on display. Here are nostalgia poems on New York City, Robert Duncan, and Eleanor Roosevelt; Eddie Cantor, government cheese, and Jack Johnson all make appearances. These poems are as beautiful and bright as anything out there. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

"[Stern’s] style insinuates itself into your consciousness like a catchy tune, so that you find your thoughts echoing its rhythms, bopping from one to another, back and forth, like thought and language doing a jitterbug."

Philadelphia Inquirer - Frank Wilson