What I Got For A Dollar
Poems
by Bert Stern
Off
the Grid Press
Boston,
MA
ISBN:
978-1-946830-01-2
93
Pages
$16.00
Review
by Dennis Daly
If
ever there were a tour de force of poetic cravings this is it. What I
Got for a Dollar is Bert Stern’s third poetry collection and it’s
magnificent. Stern craves deeply, but not shrilly, the cause behind
the cause of creation. He makes the basic argument for divinity’s
possibility as deftly as Thomas Aquinas ever did. Perhaps better. In
fact the somewhat absentminded Deity that Stern conjures up behind
his naturalistic images seems eminently likable, albeit dependent on
humanity for help in keeping up appearances.
Everything
depends on the focus in Stern’s poems. In one poem he considers the
micro world, Blake’s grain of sand. In other contexts the poet
ponders over what he curiously calls “the ordinary.” Occasionally
he jumps off the earth’s edge to commune with more fearsome, macro
and fiery powers. Even the political and the comic are not beyond
Stern’s observational attention. Also, throughout the collection,
the poet works in an exquisite commentary on aging. He embeds it in
both his persona’s longings and perceptions.
Before
the first section of poems Stern positions an elegant poetic
inscription, which acts as a prologue of sorts and speaks to the
poet’s overriding motivation. Here is a portion of it,
Behind
the ripples
in
water,
behind
old age,
torrents
of spring
plunge
down mountains.
Under
my face
I
crave another face,
as
if behind it all
a
God still sleeps…
On
the Ausable, the poem that opens the collection, portrays the
poet-protagonist following a riverside path in the aftermath of a
rain storm, seeking the most basic things and the most tangible
concepts. He appears fragile yet full of life and describes his trek
thusly,
I
wobble down the rough path
of
the bank, propped by love
and
a broken stick, eyes
agog
with dappled water.
On
the cobbled beach
totter
over stones,
breathe
beginnings in…
The
title poem, What I Got for a Dollar, sounds like an intended
political piece, dark and forbidding, that pushed back against its
author and had its way. Comedy and newfound optimism result. Here’s
the heart of the piece,
…the
man in the Red Sox cap
who
loves Jesus (it says on the button pinned to the cap),
offers
to help me lug groceries, and though, upstairs,
I
give him a dollar
he
doesn’t do it for that because, when I look for another one,
he
waves it off.
“This
works,” he says, so I know he really loves Jesus.
Contra
my argument, love looks out, waiting for us to notice.
It’s
springtime, and all the swelling renewal is like love.
I
try to imagine a time after money, after celebrities
have
stopped shouting
and
the words a child says as I walk hand in hand with her
sound
like salvation: timbre and innocence and openness
to
what’s to come.
My
favorite poem in the collection, entitled The Ordinary, considers the
scene beyond our present tame realty. Every day we pour over our
books, or screens, or peer through our pleasant windows. Habit and
routine control all. Only imagination delivers divergent details on
sedate creation and suggests the numinous, the feral and, possibly,
the continuous. The poet concludes his piece with an arresting
contrast,
The
palette’s simple as the scene: skies gray
or
blue or dappled, rain, snow or nothing falling,
a
tree, one tree I’ve pruned and love
because
it’s red and green and Japanese and
longest
to hold its leaves.
Up
ahead a gale’s coming in, but the ordinary prow
keeps
its nose to the wind.
Up
ahead rumbling thunder, visions of shipwreck,
but
something sails on, and I’m haunted by
this
ghost, this thin aroma
brilliant
and concealed.
As
if, behind the same old, a different face looks out
Through
glowing-ember eyes.
Stern’s
ekphrastic poem, Samuel Palmer’s Trees, works wonderfully well
verbalizing the original painting, Palmer’s The Gleaning Field
(1833). But Stern goes much further. He uses the painting as a way
in, a way to explore metaphysical implications of the work. Consider
this description of laboring peasants,
…the
gleaners keep their eyes
on
the ground, to pluck what’s left
from
wheat stubble.
Soon
darkness falls over them,
but
for now it’s hard to name what
lurks
in the waning light.
I
might say “God,” but which?
The
one who sees all but feels
nothing?
The
people are hungrier than
the
cattle, who freely gaze
amid
the wheat still to be harvested.
God
can’t remember why
he
sent creation forth, and
his
creatures never knew.
Craving
a deeper reality or a more fulfilling reality doesn’t just happen.
Usually it begins with a wound, a tear in the fabric of ordinary
life. In Riding Bareback in the Tropics Stern’s persona discovers
an antidote to lost love by going South. Citrus delights await. Most
of us at one time or another have this urge. Some even buy the
epistemological ticket. But few go. Perhaps it’s the coral snakes
that dissuade us. Stern’s protagonist packs up and leaves. Here he
describes the adventure and the aha-moment that follows,
So
it came about, all old ties broken,
high
in the canopies, spider monkeys noisier
than
neighbors, air orchids the horses loved
to
eat. One night, drunk, I galloped bareback
round
the rim of a great, natural bowl, with only
my
thighs to gird me against the unnamed hurt
I
somehow managed to keep dodging,
even
among coral snakes.
By reducing his
spiritual cravings to poetry Bert Stern has, in a very real sense,
already created what he seeks. Words become beginnings; they fill up
nothingness with creative constructions that allow us to comprehend
the nature of things and, by extension, nature. Lucky for Stern to
have written this book. Double lucky for his readers.
