In Beauty Bright by Gerald Stern
Having never read Gerald Stern’s poetry before, I took This Time: New and Selected Poems out from the library. The book won the National Book Award in 1998, and it deserves it; the poems are consistently charming, witty, disarmingly beautiful, and full of a kind of tongue-in-cheek, Eastern European wisdom and worldliness that seems part Isaac Bashevis Singer, and part Lenny Bruce.
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There’s a black and white photo in which the poet Stanley Kunitz lovingly holds Gerald Stern’s cheeks in both hands. It’s 1990. They’re looking into one another, and Kunitz says, “You’re the wilderness in American poetry.”