Save the Last Dance: Poems [Hardcover]

Gerald Stern (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 17, 2008

The fifteenth collection by a celebrated poet whose "terrific, boisterous energy has never flagged" (Megan Harlan, San Francisco Chronicle).

In Save the Last Dance, Gerald Stern gives us a stunning collection of his intimately personal—yet always universal, and always surprising—poems, rich with humor and insight. Shorter lyric poems in the first two parts continue the satirical and often redemptive vision of his last collection, Everything Is Burning, while never failing to carve out new emotional territory. In the third part, a long poem called "The Preacher," Stern takes the book of Ecclesiastes as a starting point for a meditation on loss, futility, and emptiness, represented here by the concept of a "hole" that resurfaces throughout.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Stern writes with a gruff, seen-it-all knowingness and with the distillation, leaps, and pivots acquired over a long life of poetic practice. His eyes are drawn to the muck and dust of the trampled world, the aging machinery of progress, the sagging porch, the dying tree, the fog and mist of confusion and fatigue. Stern unabashedly loves beauty and all of creation, but in his fifteenth collection, even the animals are aggressive, needy, or suffer pointless deaths. Stern is funny, mad for life, respectful of death, and jazzed by shared ideas. In the long, gnashing, reorienting dialogic poem “The Preacher,” a response to the book of Ecclesiastes, the poet and his friend Peter consider Stern’s vision of a hole in the universe, and his poetic process: “My figures / always start with the literal and the spreading / is like blood spreading.” His wound is our propensity for lying, killing, and destroying the living earth. In his vision of the future, love will be found in a sewer, winds and waters will rise, the poet will sing, and we will dance on. --Donna Seaman

Review

Stern writes with a gruff, seen-it-all knowingness and with the distillation, leaps, and pivots acquired over a long life of poetic practice. (Booklist )

With a deft though sometimes mischievous hand, [Stern] crafts scenes that are at once exotic and familiar. (Library Journal )

[Stern’s] strongest, strangest poems. (Publishers Weekly ) --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 80 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (May 17, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393066126
• ISBN-13: 978-0393066128
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 6.5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,226,636 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Another great book from Stern, June 14, 2008

By 

Michal L. Jones "geomason" (Shelocta, Pa USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Save the Last Dance: Poems (Hardcover)

Jerry Stern has been writing poems for over 40 years and is recognized as one of the country's best. This collection continues his stellar path. I had the honor of knowing him in the mid-60's when he taught at a small college in Western Pa. I highly recommend his books to anyone who likes humor, pathos and something that makes you think twice, because he makes you do that in his work.