Last Blue

by Gerald Stern

Overview

"Stern's bebop poems shimmer and shadow-dance down the page."—Booklist

Following his National Book Award winner, This Time, Gerald Stern further explores history and memory, the casual miracles of relationships, and his irrevocable connection to the natural world. The weight of history and the bouyance of memory, the casual miracles of relationships, and his irrevocable connection to the natural world are some of Gerald Stern's ongoing themes in this new book. The poems in Last Blue range in tone from the joyously unrestrained to the quietly somber. A Stern poem can begin with the majestic cadences of an Old Testament psalm, turn on an almost invisible hinge, and bring into focus the smallest detail. Here is a radiant collection from an essential voice in American poetry.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393321623
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	06/17/2001
Pages:	114
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.50(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.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

    ONE OF THE SMALLEST

Made of the first gray light
that came into my room,
made of the hole itself
in the cracked window blind,
thus made of sunshine, thus made of
gas and water, one of the
smallest, smallest, made of
that which seizes the eye,
that which an eagle needs
and even a mole, a mole, a
rabbit, a quail, a lilac,
it was uncreated. I
fought for it, I tore down
walls, I cut my trees,
I lay on my back, I had a
rock to support my head, I
swam in two directions,
I lay down smiling, the sun
made my eyes water, what
the wind and the dirt took away
and what was abraded and what was
exhausted, exhausted, was only
a just reflection. The sun
slowly died and I much
quicker, much quicker, I raced
until I was wrinkled but I was
lost as the star was and I
was losing light, I was dying
before I was born, thus I was
blue at the start, though I was
red much later, much later,
for I was a copy, but I was
something exploding and I was
born for just that but fought
against it, against it. The light
of morning was gray with a green
and that of evening was almost a
rose in one sky though it was
white in another—at least
in one place the light comes back—
and I disappeared like a fragment
of gas you'd call it, or fire,
fragment by fragment I think,
cooled down and changed into metal,
captured and packaged as it will be
in one or two more centuries
and turned then into a bell—
not a bridge,not a hammer—
really the tongue of a bell,
if bells will still be in use then,
and I will sing as a bell does,
you'd call it tolling—such
was my burst of light seen from
a certain viewpoint though seen from
another, another, no sudden
flash but a long slow burning
as in the olive tree burning,
as in the carob, as slow as the
olive, still giving up chocolate
after two thousand years, that's
what we lacked, our light
was like the comet's, like a
flash of fosfur, a burst
from a Spanish matchbox, the wood
broken in two, the flame
lasting six seconds—I counted—
that is, when the fosfur worked,
two or three lives lived out
in a metal ash tray, one of them
nothing but carbon, one of them
wood part way, poor thing that
died betimes, one snuffed out
just at the neck where the pinkish
head was twisted the wrong way
and one of them curling up
even after burning, thus the
light I loved stacked in a box
depending on two rough sides
and on the wind and on the
gentleness of my hand,
the index linger pressed
against the wood, the flash
of fire always a shock,
always new and enlightening,
the same explosion forever—
I call it forever—forever—
sitting with my mouth open
in some unbearable blue,
bridal wreath in my right hand,
since this is the season, my left hand
scratching and scratching, the sun
in front now. How did dogwood
get into this yard? How did
the iris manage to get here?
And grow that way? I live
without a beard, I'm streaked
with a kind of purple, my hands
are folded and overlapping, I
love the rain, I am
a type of Persian, where I am
and in this season I blossom
for fifteen hours a day, I
walk through streams of some sort—
I like that thinking—corpuscles
bombard my eyes—I call it
light—it was what gave me
life in the first place—no no
shame in wandering, no shame
in adoring—what it what it
was was so primitive
we had to disturb it—call it
disturbing, call it interfering—
at five in the morning in front of
the dumpster, at six looking down
on the river, a little tired from
the two hundred steps, my iris
in bloom down there, my maples
blowing a little, I was
a mole and a rabbit, I was
a stone at First, I turned
garish For a while and burned.

    PLUMA

Once, when there were no riches, somewhere in southern
Mexico I lost my only pen in the
middle of one of my dark and flashy moments
and euchered the desk clerk of my small hotel
out of his only piece of bright equipment
in an extravagance of double-dealing,
nor can I explain the joy in that and how I
wrote for my life, though unacknowledged, and clearly
it was unimportant and I had the money and
all I had to do was look up the Spanish and
I was not for a second constrained and there was
no glory, not for a second, it had nothing to
do with the price of the room, for example, it only
made writing what it should be and the life we
led more rare than what we thought and tested
the art of giving back, and some place near me,
as if there had to be a celebration
to balance out the act of chicanery,
a dog had started to bark and lights were burning.

    PAMET HARBOR

Going west to east on the Pamet River I sang
in the wet grasses though I was hardly dismembered
and as far as I could tell neither Christ nor Apollo
was shutting poets up. In fact, I played
my favorite tape while Haba was pulling weeds
out of the motor: "A Kiss to Build a Dream On,"
and "Sweet Lorraine" and "Makin' Whoopee," the voice
the one we adored, that wise throatiness—
Apollo couldn't do that—nor the eyeballs
nor the thick lips, the light so brilliant it shone
on all of us, we had to look at the sky;
and the wrinkled smile—Apollo just couldn't do that
with wings alone (though Christ could!) makin' whoopee.

    AGAINST THE CRUSADES

Don't think that being a left-handed nightingale was all
legerdemain
or that I am that small angry bastard who hates whores,
only I disguised it by laughing; or that it's
easy leaving a restaurant by yourself and holding
your other hand against the bricks to keep from falling;
or anybody can play the harp, or anybody knows the words
to Blue Sunday and After the Ball Was Just Over You Dropped
Dead.

If you can stand Strauss then so can I,
oh filthy Danube, oh filthy Delaware, oh filthy Allegheny.

And anyone who never opened a Murphy bed
night after night for seven years without ripping
the sheet and had neither desk nor dresser can't walk
in my shoes or wear my crocodile T-shirt.
And anyone thinking that a Jew being a Jew
is something you should apologize for as if Richard
Wagner just stepped into the room wearing a bronze
headpiece with a pink feather sticking out of it
is nothing less than a fool himself who buys into
dead stoves and dead feelings and doesn't know the
sweetness of his own lips and the tenderness of his fingers.

God bless the Jewish comedians who never denigrated Blacks,
and God bless the good gentiles and God bless Mayor Scully
and Councilman Wolk and Rosie Rosewall and Eleanor
Roosevelt;
and the chorus of Blue Saints behind Bishop Elder Beck
and the old theater on Wylie Avenue I visited every Sunday
night
to hear them sing and pray and hear him preach.

God bless the Lucca Cafe. God bless the green benches
in Father Demo Square and the dear Italian lady
carrying a huge bouquet of red and white roses
in front of her like a candelabra and the tiny white
baby's breath that filled the empty spaces with clapping and
singing.

    RAVAGES

I hold my right hand up so the Greek will stop
talking for a minute; I am recording
everything with my left and my wrist is hurting
as it always does. His harsh language
is a combination of anger and humor, one
supporting the other, and his body, stiff
and out of control, is just an extension of
his scattered words. His wife went to the Poconos
to be with their oldest daughter for a while
and he is rebuffed and lonely so he talks
to a dove and reads his paper. He it was who
cursed the Colonels and he it was who slept
in a cave in 1942 and fought
the Germans with a hunting rifle, he tied
a knife blade to the bore, and suffered indignities
selling hot dogs in Easton, Pennsylvania,
for twenty years and he deserves some love.
He lifts himself with a twirling motion and when he
reaches into my yard to steal a tea rose
I tell him—in English—how the leg has to breathe;
and how the forehead absorbs the sun. I kick
my watering can so he kicks his and we slam
our kitchen doors together though his was a second
after mine, or mine after his, so one of us
is left alone and one turns on his light
before the other does and starts his tea
a second sooner or closes his bedroom window
before the other or studies his ravages.

Editorial Reviews

Stern's 12th collection is his first since winning the 1998 National Book Award for the new and selected This Time. The poems still rely on Stern's inimitable blend of coiled anger, love of life and raffish, on-the-outside-looking-in wit. Poem after poem reflects on what it means to have been a Jew, a Pennslyvanian, a nature-and-weather watcher, a world traveler and, for a longer time than many poets of his stature, an unknown writer during the middle of the last century: "If you can stand Strauss then so can I,/ oh filthy Danube, oh filthy Delaware, oh filthy Allegheny.// And anyone who never opened a Murphy bed/ night after night for seven years without ripping/ the sheet and had neither desk nor dresser can't walk/ in my shoes or wear my crocodile t-shirt." Stern's remembrances are not so much nostalgias as attempts to telescope the speaker's world and worldview through verse-talking, to test everyday language's ability to render his experiences to his liking, or at least his satisfaction. The trick often works so well that readers won't notice that the language is far from ordinary, and that the poet's barrage of things are carefully chosen: "I had a Brown's Beach jacket with a reddish/ thorn in one of the pockets, which was my toothpick/ for thirty-five years, and a vest to match, and a flattened acorn I kept in the darkness; and I had a pencil// I used to keep my balance, the edges were eaten,/ the lead was gray, the green eraser was worn/ down to the metal, and I had a spiral notebook/ I kept for emotions, and I folded my money." While there are few surprises here, the quality of the poems is consistently quite high, and the voice behind them remains winning and companionable. (Apr.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Stern, who currently lives in New Jersey, has numerous honors and awards to his credit, among them the Ruth Lily Poetry Prize and the National Book Award for Poetry in 1998. In these poems, even more than in his earlier ones, Stern stresses the theme of light in apposition—and opposition—to darkness. `The light of the sun . . . creates darkness, a way of saying that life brings death.` He points out how this theme is recurrent in religion and literature, forming an inexhaustible source for both impulses, as well as serving as a metaphor for the forces at work in the natural world. `With me,` he states, `it is overwhelming, personal`—and indeed it proves so in this rich and satisfying collection of his latest poems. Stern draws heavily from a store of memories that are intensely personal, but his imagery is in the vernacular. A good deal of it (strangely for an essentially urban poet) is horticultural, but most definitely not in any flowery sense. He describes how his fractious neighbor, propped on his good leg and his cane, stoops to smell his roses and indicates that `where he threw his wine glass down a bleeding heart is starting to show under the motherly leaves.` Stern's predilection for the chiaroscuro interplay of light and dark leads to a wonderfully varied work that is autobiographical in its details and metaphysical in its scope.

Kirkus Reviews