American Sonnets: Poems - Softcover

Gerald Stern is the author of nineteen volumes of poetry. He has been awarded the National Book Award, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the National Jewish Book Award, the Wallace Stevens Award, and the Robert Frost Medal, among many other honors. He lives in New York City.

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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