From Publishers Weekly
Part autobiography, part meditative series, this memoir by New Jersey's first poet laureate will appeal mostly to Stern familiars. Others are less likely to be charmed by Stern's aimless prose style. "I don't know if I'm getting these events in the right order or even the right year," he writes at one point, and it's evident that he doesn't really care. Instead, Stern, whose collection This Time won the National Book Award in 1998, appears to aim for a feeling of idle chatter-the narrative is digressive, repetitious and bereft of clear chronology. Readers willing to submit patiently to such a raconteur will be compensated with morsels of wisdom. Descriptions of his parents' Sunday morning quarrels, for example, provide a platform for a discourse on Calvinist and Jewish Sabbaths. And ideas about guilt and remorse surface after he recounts how he (innocently?) abetted an acquaintance rape. Chance encounters appear to be a mainstay of Stern's life, and celebrated figures (Casals, Warhol, Orlovitz) appear in walk-ons that diminish them. (Fans of Stern's poetry will also find plenty of information about how he developed his distinctive writing style.) The underlying theme of this memoir-the power and inadequacy of memory-has weight, but Stern's rich meditations are framed by trivia. It's a technique that works well in the author's verse-he can carve a meaningful poem out of a chance encounter with a hotel desk clerk-but, unfortunately, the crafting necessary to achieve such transformations is missing in these prose musings.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Readers familiar with National Book Award winner Stern's swinging, streetwise, and metaphysical poetry will find this collection of autobiographical and spiritual ramblings extraordinarily moving, as will anyone curious about the coming-of-age of a twentieth-century working-class American writer. Now in his eighties, Stern is by turns flinty and rhapsodic, stoic and sexy as he recounts indelible incidents from his scrappy Pittsburgh childhood, his nearly surreal stint in the military, his improvised European sojourns, and the night he was shot in the neck. The veteran of street fights, unreasonable arrests, countless confrontations with anti-Semitism, and dangerous love affairs, Stern fought his way out of a "terrible isolation" and into the solace of literature. As he wrestles with regrets, channels joy, and poses keen questions about forgiveness and charity, Stern offers ravishingly poetic inquiries into everything from the Jewish Sabbath to the tree of life to love, posing crucial questions of forgiveness and charity. Not only did Stern become a poet against all odds, he has remained a warrior, a seeker, and a writer of conscience.
Donna SeamanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
