POETRY

In Beauty Bright

by Gerald Stern
. September 2012. 128p. 978-0-39308-644-7. 25.95.
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National Book Award winner Stern’s newest collection is marked by an unmistakable vigor. Its distinguishing characteristic, momentum, is also its greatest accomplishment; most of these poems are driven forth nimbly by a single sentence, sometimes with several clauses linked by semicolons. For all the “lyric” lines that typify Stern’s style, though, these poems exhibit a wonderful sense of linguistic play, as in “Spring” (“I am ashamed the crows too shiny their feathers/ too wet the cliff on my right too red the blood/ the blood of any animal”), and sense of humor, as seen in “Dumb,” characterized by a speaker caught up in a judgmental moment of fury aimed at bicyclists (“they are so dumb and their bikes have so many dumb/ and useless gears like a dumb idiot box”).
VERDICT What a pleasure it is to read not what happens but how the speaker’s mind works through it. The tumbling lines of David Kirby come to mind but with a Sternian succinctness; Stern has pretty nearly perfected the vigorous one-sentence poem.
Reviewed by Sue White , Sep 15, 2012
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