American Sonnets Poems [Hardcover]

As part and parcel of a gruffly expansive plain style, Stern has worked through his Jewish, Rust Belt and working-class roots in book after book, while remaining open to experience from anywhere. Those roots, and the rest of his personal history, dominate this winningly outspoken, if misleadingly titled, sequence, whose "sonnets" are really unrhymed, free-verse poems of 20 or so lines: most consist of a single, sinuous sentence exploring a single moment in Stern's past, "explaining what was opened in my life and what was destroyed," and linking his joys and travails to those of his generation. "Alone" remembers when "I wore two pairs of socks and hid my money"; "You" recalls "the smell of snow in 1940, mixed as it was with coal fumes." Clocks, dogs, dandelions, the Pennsylvania coal country, Manhattan, fellow writers, students, wives, parents, children, gangster cousins and even (in one vivid adaptation) Francois Villon receive exploration and homage. The one-long-sentence strategy avoids monotony by varying its tones, which include the comic ("A string-bean is born every second") and the raunchily sexual, as well as the mournful and the lyrical: he concludes with "a star of the fourth magnitude surrounded by planets, shining on all of us." Stern's verbal strategies land him, this time out, somewhere between W.S. Merwin and Philip Levine; their fans and the fans of Stern's previous verse will surely enjoy these very personal poems.
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To a purist, these 20-something-line poems are only nominally sonnets, but National Book Award winner Stern (In Time, 1998) nevertheless appropriates the term to describe the 59 lyric vessels into which he has poured seven decades' worth of personal reminiscences and observations on everything from Studebakers to string beans. Some are marginal entries in a random diary recomposed after memory has lost the details ("I can't remember what the class trip was / I think we were going to visit the Samaritans"), while others attempt to archive what details remain ("I liked this hotel best because the swimming pool/ was on the roof"). At their best, they convey the irreducible essence of hard experiences ("Aberdeen Proving Grounds, 1946"), the tangible grit and abrasion of those periods that must be endured before the arrival of better days, as well as the pockets of solace that make such stretches bearable ("Sink"). Delivered with Stern's trademark candor and conversational intimacy, these poems are fitting footnotes to a life keenly lived. Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

The sonnet is at once concentrated and accommodating, and National Book Award winner Stern uses the form with both control and ardor, going beyond the traditional 14 lines to show that he can flaunt convention without sacrificing mastery. His sonnets are "American" in their expansiveness, jittery energy, largesse of feeling, tributes to nature, and ambulatory rhythm as he traverses moody terrains both geographical and emotional. Stern recalls the past with a devil-may-care bemusement that is subtly belied by the keen specificity of his sensuous descriptions of loved ones and the snowy hills and sooty towns of Pennsylvania. In "Beechview," in which the poet slows down to gaze at a house he used to live in and draws the unwelcome attention of a police cruiser, he expresses a wry irony that gives way abruptly to a burst of passion, a dramatic pattern repeated in deeply moving variations throughout this vital, surprising, meditative yet muscular cycle. The feeling of being alive is Stern's great subject, and he sees magic in a spider web, even an old sink, and hears music everywhere. Donna Seaman
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Stern writes as if he had to take notice of every single thing in the world. -- Philadelphia Inquirer

A collection of 59 sonnets of 20 lines or so by Gerald Stern. It contains sonnets of an autobiographical nature as well as sonnets covering the visionary in surges of memory and language.

Gerald Stern, winner of the National Book Award for This Time, lives in Lambertville, New Jersey.