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'This Time: New and Selected Poems' by Gerald Stern

Pittsburgh poet unfurls a fine ‘This Time’

Sunday, December 13, 1998

By Peter Blair

	This Time: New and Selected Poems By Gerald Stern Norton $27.50

Gerald Stern’s retrospective book, which earned him the National Book Award for Poetry this year, gathers a majority of his work from his nine previous collections.

For 20 years, Stern has been a major force in contemporary poetry. The poems of this Pittsburgh native, known for their audacious sympathy, sense of place and immediate accessibility, have influenced a generation of American poets.

His literary forebears are the Romantic poet Percy Shelley, whose passion for life and art Stern enacts, and Walt Whitman, whose expansive poetic lines and conversational tone are reflected in Stern’s work, humming with contemporary energy and wildness.

Readers familiar with Stern will find old favorites along with new work and many out-of-print poems from his award-winning early collection, “Lucky Life.”

Readers new to Stern’s work may be dazzled by the wealth of allusion, the range of imagery and the many moods of this changeable persona. References to Schubert, Hannibal, Plato, Reagan, all in a single poem — a beautiful lament for his father — can make these poems seem like a test of one’s general knowledge. We may not be able to keep up with him. Yet the virtuoso connections come from a deep sympathy with the human condition that raises the language almost to the level of prophesy.

The book’s last poem ends with a reference to the Biblical prophet Amos, whose life in ancient Israel at a time of power, wealth and corruption mirrors present-day America.

Stern writes that Amos “hated coldness, accommodation, extortion, oppression and roared in the grapes … and melted mountains.” These poems melt mountains: mountains of hatred and prejudice in the human heart.

“Melted” is key. Stern shuns the cliche of “moved mountains,” a show of power more apt for dictators or proselytizing preachers. His poems melt coldness and oppression out of us by celebrating what’s lost and singing out gratitude for the world’s ordinary yet blessed objects.

Many Stern poems are religious. The world is like a cathedral. Every street, bridge and roadside ditch is a sacred place in which to meditate and mourn a dead leaf, quarreling sparrows or the Holocaust. In “Soap,” Stern steals a soap bar from a men’s room, calling it a “green Jew.” We realize it represents a Holocaust victim:

He had one dream, this piece of soap,

he wanted to live in Wien

and sit behind a hedge on Sunday afternoon

listening to music and eating a tender schnitzel.

Stern’s sympathetic vision extends to animals and famous historical figures. The ducks, moles, mice and squirrels in these poems are emissaries of strength and weakness, and through the magic of Stern’s associative, metaphoric inventiveness, occasions to affirm the joy of life. After naming the habits, features and various ways to cook duck, Stern writes:

This is a poem against gnosticism;

it is a poem against the hatred of the flesh

and all the vicious twists and turns we take

to calm our frightened souls.

It is a poem celebrating the eating of duck.

In another poem, Stern imagines riding an airplane with 17th-century British philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who believed “Only pride and fear of death/move us.” Stern locates himself against Hobbes’ materialism but retains a grudging sympathy for the man who wrote “a complete version of the Iliad and Odyssey/when he was ninety.”

This trans-historical vision also embraces the Pittsburgh of Stern’s youth. Raised in the city’s Beechview section, Stern depicts the landscape as a passageway to other worlds and cultures. He’s not intimidated by a mountain on the Greek island of Samos because, as he says:

I was born in Pittsburgh

and I know hills; I know the second rise

after a leveling off

… I walked until my thighs

had turned to stone.

Though Stern’s conversational voice can sound like a friend talking to us, the language is heightened and the voices varied and surprising. Stern is adept at parodying the rhetoric of our times. In “Lyric,” he’s the poet, nostalgic for immortality:

Has anyone … lifted a rose mum to his face

to see if he’ll live forever?

“Swan’s Legs” shifts with dazzling assurance from scenes of the ballet, “Swan Lake,” to images of “suffering” swans being prepared for slaughter.

Poems that begin casually, with apparently random and ordinary events, suddenly shimmer with unexpected insights.

In “Morning Harvest,” Stern watches “Pennsylvania spiders stretch their silk between the limbs of our great trees.” As the pronouns shift from “they” to “you,” we identify with the spider weaving a web across empty space

We all send out our crazy artwork, gluey and sticky, into the world where nature is simultaneously a fertile field and a graveyard. Stern’s wry humor — this experience is merely a “little bout with life in the morning” — sets up the final lines of slim hope on the streets:

It is lights that save us …

Blue lights rushing in to help the wretched,

red lights carrying twenty pounds of oxygen down the highway,

white lights entering the old Phoenician channels

bringing language and mathematics and religion into the darkness.

The essence of Stern’s work connects the trivial to the prophetic, the past to the present, in surprising and humorous ways. He links us all with his beautiful webs of language strung out across neighborhoods, across cultures, across centuries.

Poet Peter Blair teaches at Georgetown University.