Customer Reviews

Everything Is Burning: Poems

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Stern Vision: A Tree of Hemingway, Yeats, Proust

Gerald Stern's new book, Everything Is Burning, is deft, profound, and perhaps the most enjoyable volume of poems composed in English in decades. It is its own masterwork, combining eight decades of Stern's life with his rollicking roving, greedy reading, and hilarious wisdom. He steals from all he is, which includes a Hemingway eye for exact detail and rich simplicity, Yeats's flow and incantation, and Proust's savage memory that makes a daguerreotype of each significant face, trait, and event. This erudite humanist makes you laugh at clumsy ethnicities, cry with compassion for a dead child sister, and wonder before a lily of the field near a Pocano traffic jam where a former wild student suddenly materializes standing on the highway. Elegant surprise follows elegant surprise. He is shock and paradox.

A relentless moralist, the outrageously observant Stern is incapable of sternness and an enemy of pomp. When everything is burning, he's there, maybe holding a fedora, taking poetic notes, yet also in the mix to participate and feel. He has lived. And that means with Felonious Monk, cat piss in the South Bronx; recording the horror of war camps or sitting alien on a steel railroad track, eating a sandwich. Before his appetite for the fascinating ordinary, lowdown and sordid, the rapturous Mahler, Ecclesiastes and a burned lilac, you must not skip a word, much less a poem, in this beautiful gathering. He takes you to his abode in "Hemingway's House":

I don't want to go to Hemingway's house,
let him come to mine, walk in and we'll do
The Killers at my kitchen table, he with his
back to the Japanese maple, me with my back
to the Maytag, ginger ale for one, white rum
the other; the dragon and the mayfly, death and the
knowledge of death,
Monk and Bartók all the same to me.

I often wonder what makes Jerry run. Of course he has lust in his lungs, and his poetry breathes each year in new ways. Many of our best poets----Eliot, Cummings, Auden, Wordsworth---bloom, mature in their powers, and, alas, wither, becoming a mannerism of earlier word and spirit. Others---Rilke, Yeats, Stevens, or short-lived Wilfred Owen and Hart Crane--- dramatically gain strength. Stern grows. Like his contemporaries Ruth Stone and Stanley Moss, he reveals a cumulatively significant voice, which years magnify. But he remains the child man in his renewals. The vision, lust, and ethics have their unifying center in a bizarre passion, a passion that prevails whether he is out organizing unions, teaching, reading, giving readings, writing books. In those books, memoir, play, essay and poetry, Stern resorts to a spontaneous trickery and wins.

With respect to poetic means, in the Eliot and James Wright tradition Gerald Stern sticks primarily to the line, to an enjambed line that stands alone and sparkles, whether with glass, trash, and even when he writes about a fisherman's worm in a can. Somehow the worms end up like stubby fingers in freezing sun-glare. He doesn't scatter his word pictures on the page. A lyrical blank verse determines prosody, and each word counts in lines that follow with compelling speed and rhythm. This perfection of spontaneity creates belief. Consider his poignant poem "Sylvia" in which he moves from existential speculation to a re collection of his older sister in 1933, a year older than himself, who is dead at nine:

Across a space peopled with stars I am
laughing while my sides ache for existence
it turns out is profound though the profound
because of time it turns out is an illusion
and all of this is infinitely improbable
given the space, for which I gratefully lie
in three feet of snow making a shallow grave
I would have called an angel otherwise and
think of my own rapturous escape from
living only as dust and dirt, little sister.

In an age of extreme commercial and political conformity, of stifling trash culture that holds dominion in the media, the poet is in need. But even among poets---and there are so many fine poets today---there is also classroom conformity, no matter what the pronouncements. Stern belongs to no sect and no one. But then he is with Walt and Emily, with Baudelaire and his prostitutes and blind, with Vladimir Mayakovsky ranting on Brooklyn Bridge, with his grandfather's stick in a Pittsburgh shtetl or the French surrealist Desnos walking among corpses in Buchenwald a few days from his liberation and death from typhus. Stern is the unparalleled voice of injustice, comedy, and survival.

Some years ago Gerald Stern told me that he got a friend to distract the guard in Walt Whitman's house in Camden, New Jersey, so that he could lie down for some minutes in the Quaker poet's bed. I haven't heard the story yet, but I know that in some flower bed in Amherst outside the old Dickinson mansion, there are still night footprints of this wanderer, who, in homage to another deep love, has examined the great shy genius's taste in hyacinths, begonias and hydrangeas. Is he for real? More real and revealing than any of us. Comic, tragic or more often a sly commingling of circumstance and emotion, the universal Stern in Everything is Burning is a treat for reader and re-reader. He is a sheaf of postage stamps with diverse political mugs, lovers, geographies, and nocturnal flower beds that flash the biblical grin of Jerry Stern.
Willis Barnstone

Not a bad poem in the batch, but none are true sparklers. This collection will not blow you away. I would describe this as nice work from a excellent writer, but few of these will likely go in a "best of" collection. If you only buy one Stern book, it should not be this one, but if you enjoy his work there is no reason not to enjoy this one.