Thinking, feeling in poems and prose

In Beauty Bright
By Gerald Stern
W.W. Norton. 125 pp. $25.95

nolead ends nolead begins Stealing History
By Gerald Stern
Trinity University Press. 306 pp. $17.94

nolead ends nolead begins

Reviewed by Frank Wilson

Gerald Stern is one of those writers whose style insinuates itself into your consciousness like a catchy tune, so that you find your thoughts echoing its rhythms, bopping from one to another, back and forth, like thought and language doing a jitterbug. Here he is, in Stealing History, telling about "a ghostly experience" he once had:

. . . when it happened I would have described it as a kind of dizziness, of being filled with deep pleasantness, a pleasure in which I was overcome and held onto the brick wall of a building beside me. I seem to remember I was always going slightly downhill, and it was my right hand I held against the wall - and it lasted for maybe ten, fifteen seconds - I think longer - and it was delicious, and there was absolutely no fear in it, and I walked normally and happily immediately after, and I never much thought about it and never told anyone about it.

More laid back and (seemingly) improvisatory than memoir or autobiography, Stealing History is probably best described as reminiscence. In a section called "Diary of a Mind," Stern explains it in a one-sentence paragraph:

What I'm doing, I suppose, is writing a kind of diary of the mind, a record of what I'm thinking about over a certain period of time, what passes by, what stays, complicated by where I am, or where I happen to be, what I'm reading (high or low), what drifts in and, like a wild and obstinate dog, attaches itself to me and keeps whining until I finally reach down and stroke its bony, grateful head . . .

It's riffs like this, at once free-floating and precise, that give the book its tang.

Later on, though, in a section called "Straddling," we get this: "you never get it right in prose - that's why you write poetry. That way you avoid pitfalls. Just as you create others."

This may be so, but anyone who reads Stealing History in conjunction with In Beauty Bright, Stern's latest collection of poetry, is bound to notice a symbiotic relation between his poetry and his prose. The latter is the soil out of which the former germinates and blossoms. Consider "Blue Intact":

I looked at the earth with drunken moonlit eyes

and thought I had discovered the blue intact

which gave me such pleasure before my sleep and let me

open and close one eye the while I wandered

before I fell into my own hole there

chewing and rechewing the blue earth,

loving and reloving as the moon does there

dark behind the cloud, then reappearing,

worrying over its own huge islands as the earth does there.

Just one long sentence, as many of Stern's poems are. His perennial subject is not so much what he thinks as how he thinks it. And how he feels what he thinks. Because, with Stern, what gives thought its shape is the feeling that envelops it.

So the poems and the prose can both seem at times haphazard, letting things intrude that perhaps were best left out - including cranky political outbursts - but there's craftiness as well as craft at work, as in these lines from "Journey":

He had been waiting

all night for the acorn moon and eating pineapple

topping over his ice cream and arguing

either physics or philosophy. He thinks,

at this late date, it was the cave again

throwing a shadow, although it may have been

only some way of reconciling the two

oblivious worlds, which was his mission anyhow -

if only there was a second moon.

Who else but Stern could make a verbal sundae out of the moon and Plato's cave and pineapple topping? What you get when you pick up Stealing History or In Beauty Bright is a most individual fella.