Scan barcode
timbo001's review
4.0
I can't fathom the low rankings for this collection. Stern's lyrics are lucid fragments, as if overheard out of context by someone in another room.
mlindner's review
1.0
http://marklindner.info/blog/2012/12/01/stern-in-beauty-bright/
Another book I grabbed off of the new books shelves at Deschutes Public Library. I figured if it was written by an old guy with 17 other books of poetry under his belt and several awards, including a National Book Award, a National Jewish Book Award and a Wallace Stevens Award, he must be reasonably talented.
Talented? Perhaps. I had to force myself to read it from the very beginning. I cannot explain why I simply did not give up. Perhaps it was because I added it not just to Goodreads but to Open Library and Zotero (all my assorted documentation) at the start instead of at the end like usual, and when I did I sort of jokingly told myself it was so that I would finish it. Bah!
This may be great poetry and the author may be extremely talented. I could not stand it. It is basically stream of conscious run-on sentences that meander and loop back and abuse the reader’s sense of complex sentence structure. That is, he (except for one poem, I think) only ever uses a period at the end of a poem and the rest is full of commas and em dashes, mostly, along with semi-colons and the occasional colon. This I can do; I do it myself in my normal writing. But he also jumps to whole new clauses (really sentences!) in the middle of a clause with no punctuation or other indicator whatsoever. It truly is often stream of conscious writing.
It might be for you but I could not stand it. Still not sure why I forced myself to finish it; it would have been far simpler to remove it from my Open Library list and from Zotero.
I wrote the above at a bit past half way through as I wanted to get down what I was feeling and thinking about it.
The back half did improve some for me. There are a couple poems with more normal sentence structures and even a couple that that I liked. Here’s the one I liked the best:
Slow to Learn
Sarcasm came down on me like red dust and
contempt like the street lamps they lit after school
so we could find our way home in the dark.
I lived in fear that I would lose my colored bookmark and
shame at the laughter coming from the front seat of the Pontiac.
And I hate that I was the truest of all balloons
You beat for the sweet and delicate things inside.
But I’m fed up with bitterness
and I learned from Brecht that anger at injustice
makes your voice hoarse, and hatred of vileness
distorts your features, but I already knew it.
All in all, can’t say that I enjoyed it but perhaps you might. Perhaps I’ll look for one of his earliest works to see if his style has changed or whether it stayed pretty much the same.
Another book I grabbed off of the new books shelves at Deschutes Public Library. I figured if it was written by an old guy with 17 other books of poetry under his belt and several awards, including a National Book Award, a National Jewish Book Award and a Wallace Stevens Award, he must be reasonably talented.
Talented? Perhaps. I had to force myself to read it from the very beginning. I cannot explain why I simply did not give up. Perhaps it was because I added it not just to Goodreads but to Open Library and Zotero (all my assorted documentation) at the start instead of at the end like usual, and when I did I sort of jokingly told myself it was so that I would finish it. Bah!
This may be great poetry and the author may be extremely talented. I could not stand it. It is basically stream of conscious run-on sentences that meander and loop back and abuse the reader’s sense of complex sentence structure. That is, he (except for one poem, I think) only ever uses a period at the end of a poem and the rest is full of commas and em dashes, mostly, along with semi-colons and the occasional colon. This I can do; I do it myself in my normal writing. But he also jumps to whole new clauses (really sentences!) in the middle of a clause with no punctuation or other indicator whatsoever. It truly is often stream of conscious writing.
It might be for you but I could not stand it. Still not sure why I forced myself to finish it; it would have been far simpler to remove it from my Open Library list and from Zotero.
I wrote the above at a bit past half way through as I wanted to get down what I was feeling and thinking about it.
The back half did improve some for me. There are a couple poems with more normal sentence structures and even a couple that that I liked. Here’s the one I liked the best:
Slow to Learn
Sarcasm came down on me like red dust and
contempt like the street lamps they lit after school
so we could find our way home in the dark.
I lived in fear that I would lose my colored bookmark and
shame at the laughter coming from the front seat of the Pontiac.
And I hate that I was the truest of all balloons
You beat for the sweet and delicate things inside.
But I’m fed up with bitterness
and I learned from Brecht that anger at injustice
makes your voice hoarse, and hatred of vileness
distorts your features, but I already knew it.
All in all, can’t say that I enjoyed it but perhaps you might. Perhaps I’ll look for one of his earliest works to see if his style has changed or whether it stayed pretty much the same.
More...