Publisher Description

For over four decades, Gerald Stern has been writing his own brand of expansive, deep-down American poetry. Now in his nineties, this "sometimes comic, sometimes tragic visionary" (Edward Hirsch) engages a lifetime of memories in his poems, blending philosophical, wide-ranging intellect with boisterous wit. Memory unites the poems in Blessed as We Were, which reach back through seven collections written over almost two decades. Stern explores casual miracles, relationships, and the natural world in Last Blue (2002); offers a satirical and redemptive vision in Everything Is Burning (2005) and Save the Last Dance (2008); meditates on the metamorphosis of aging in In Beauty Bright (2012); and captures the sensual joys of life—even when they are far in the past—in the wistful love poems and elegies of Galaxy Love (2017). The volume concludes with over two dozen new poems that combine the metaphysical with the domestic, from the passage of time and the cost of love to the profound banality of cardboard and its uses. With his characteristic exuberant, oracular voice animating every line, Stern reminds us why he is one of the great American poets, one who has long "been telling us that the best way to live is not so much for poetry, but through poetry" (New York Times Book Review).

Back Cover

Praise for Gerald Stern: "The gratitude we feel toward Gerald Stern's work doesn't just have to do with his originality...Perhaps it's listening in amazement as he resurrects our histories for us to sing; perhaps it's how he finds the joy in our grief, the unexpected ecstasies inhabiting the mundane...Stern is one of those rare poetic souls who makes it almost impossible to remember what our world was like before his poetry came to exalt it." - C. K. Williams "[Stern] is nostalgic, expansive, intellectual, silly, serious, homespun, highfalutin--sometimes all at once...His perspective, and his way of accessing religious, political, and literary history, have earned him a place among great American poets." - Jewish Book Council "[Stern's is] a mind that dances, prances, leaps and falls, and leaps again, through all of Western culture and history, all of its cities, many of its composers and violinists, all of its thinkers, and all of its prophets--of whom he is one." - Alicia Ostriker

Author Biography

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.

Review

"One of our most influential and beloved poets, fifty years after the publication of his first book, Gerald Stern is still in love, still angry, still outraged, and still funny. Blessed as We Were is the expression of a full life of loving, a crowning achievement, the luminous offering of an American original." -- Toi Derricotte

Review Quote

"One of our most influential and beloved poets, fifty years after the publication of his first book, Gerald Stern is still in love, still angry, still outraged, and still funny. Blessed as We Were is the expression of a full life of loving, a crowning achievement, the luminous offering of an American original."

Details