Save the Last Dance

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Save the Last Dance: Poems (eBook) Pub. Date: 5/17/2008 Publisher: Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
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Save the Last Dance (Reprint) Pub. Date: 12/14/2009 Publisher: Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
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Save the Last Dance Pub. Date: 5/26/2008 Publisher: Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.

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Overview

In Save the Last Dance, Gerald Stern gives us a stunning collection of his intimately personal—yet always universal, and always surprising—poems, rich with humor and insight. Shorter lyric poems in the first two parts continue the satirical and often redemptive vision of his last collection, Everything Is Burning, while never failing to carve out new emotional territory. In the third part, a long poem called "The Preacher," Stern takes the book of Ecclesiastes as a starting point for a meditation on loss, futility, and emptiness, represented here by the concept of a "hole" that resurfaces throughout.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

Honored for his plainspoken, blue-collar manner-its honesty, and the literary learning it belies-Stern, born in 1925, is now writing his strongest, strangest poems. Like 2005's Everything Is Burning, this collection displays passionate attachments-to daily pleasures, poets living and dead whom Stern has befriended (especially in a warm elegy for William Matthews) and memory itself. In 1946, one poem remembers, "I was a bellows/ and one by one my lungs were ruined but I wouldn't/ change my life, what for?" The short poems mostly comprise single, extended sentences, piling up Stern's gruff loves and recollections faster than death and old age can knock them down: a poem about a weather vane finds Stern "amazed/ that we could last the way we do compared to/ birds just blown by the wind." The scenes in this 17th collection come from his youth in Philadelphia and New York City, and from exurban New Jersey, where he lives now. The final section, a long poem in dialogue form entitled "The Preacher," imagines a conversation with the younger poet Peter Richards, whose subjects include Kant, Mingus, the uses of anger and the variety of wildflowers; it may not stick in many readers' memories, but the short poems before it certainly will. (May)

Library Journal

"She was a darling with her roses, though what I/ like is lavender for I can dry it and/ nothing is blue like that,/ so here I am,/ in my arms a bouquet of tragic lavender,/ the whole history of Southern France against my/ chest." Stern (This Time) has become a master of rich, intimately personal poems that strike at universal chords but do so with surprise, intelligence, and wry humor. With a deft though sometimes mischievous hand, he crafts scenes that are at once exotic and familiar: "He was dead so he was only a puff/ of smoke at the most and I had to labor to see him/ or just to hear and when we spoke it was as/ if we were waiting in the rain together." The short, personal lyrics in the first two sections are balanced against a long poem of meditation, "The Preacher," which begins with the book of Ecclesiastes and in dialog, real and imagined, with his friend Peter and considers loss, futility, and emptiness, the "hole" that exists when what was is not anymore: "As if the one tree you love so well and hardly/ can embrace it is so huge so that with-/ out it there might be a hole in the universe/ explains how the killing of any one thing can/ likewise make a hole." Highly recommended.
—Louis McKee

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780393066128
Publisher: Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date: 5/26/2008
Pages: 80
Sales rank: 1,187,263
Product dimensions: 5.70 (w) x 8.50 (h) x 0.50 (d)

Meet the Author

Gerald Stern the author of sixteen poetry collections, has won the National Book Award, the National Jewish Book Award, the Ruth Lilly Prize, and the Wallace Stevens Award, among others. He lives in Lambertville, New Jersey.

Part I

Diogenes 13

Traveling Backwards 14

Thom McCann 15

1950 16

The Truth 17

What for? 18

From Where I Sit 19

Glut 20

Bronze Roosters 21

Blue Like That 22

59 N. Sitgreaves 23

Spaghetti 24

Flute 25

Love 26

Bill Matthews 27

Flute II 20

Stomachs 29

Before Eating 30

Part II

Asphodel 39

Jackknife 41

Jew 42

Rapture Lost 43

What Then? 45

One Poet 46

Dream III 47

My Dear 48

Lost Shoe 49

Wordsworth 50

Lorca 51

Rukeyser 52

He Again 53

Death by Wind 54

Love Box 55

Cooper Union 56

Rose in Your Teeth 57

Save the Last Dance for Me 58

Part III

Introduction to "The Preacher" 63

The Preacher 64

Notes on "The Preacher" 90

Credits 91

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