Everything Is Burning: Poems

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 st