Reading the poetry of Dan Gerber, we are summoned to this larger truth: Though we live in fraught times, on the tipping point of human self-destruction, we and our planet are still very much alive.
In one of his last sonnets, nearly five hundred years ago, Michelangelo Buonarroti confronted the paradox of our earthly existence: "Why beauty mixed with terror, feeds so strangely my desire." Reading The End of Michelangelo, we are similarly reminded that the very fact of being alive-experiencing our fleeting, fragile existence-is our only source of joy, our only avenue of consolation. These are poems that wake us up, revivify our desire to go on living despite our times, to counter our times; if poetry has a purpose, it may be exactly this. As T.H. White suggests, we can't save our world if we don't first savor it.
"Dan Gerber tenderly reels his readers through the 'beautiful movie' he calls the passing of time on Earth, in a language completely unadorned and Zen-like in its quietude. The thing itself carries the weight off these poems that recall the deep imagery of Vallejo, Neruda, and Wright." -Rain Taxi
About the Author :
Dan Gerber's Trying to Catch the Horses (MSU Press) receivedForeword Magazine's Book of the Year Award in Poetry, and A Primer on ParallelLivesHis work has appeared in many journals andanthologies, including The New Yorker, Poetry, The Nation, and The Sun.Along with poetry collections, Gerber haspublished three novels, a collection of short stories, and two books ofnonfiction. He and his wife Debbie live with their menagerie, domestic andwild, in the mountains of California's Central Coast.
Review :
Praise for The End of Michelangelo
“If poetry can lay claim to a healing or restorative power, it may well be found in Gerber’s poetry. In this, his 10th collection (after Particles: New and Selected Poems), Gerber draws on personal memories and the Central California landscape to reveal the fleeting, everyday marvels which are always available to us if we pay enough attention. . . . The poet’s Zen openness to nature attunes him to synthesize what he sees with what he feels through spare but immediate language, summing up his poetics in one concise sentence: ‘Without poetry the visible and invisible/ worlds wouldn’t be aware of each other.’ VERDICT A timeless oasis of quietude in our contemporary maelstrom of uncertainty and apprehension, Gerber’s poetry vividly reminds us that while ‘the scale of pleasure ascends into terror…/ the pleasure is in being alive.’—Library Journal
"In the walk toward death’s horizon or in the wake of death’s intervention into our daily existence, we often turn to poems for consolation, for insight and illumination, as a tether to pull us across the chasm of loss and absence. The poems in Gerber’s tenth book of poetry, The End of Michelangelo, are a fine and priceless gift, a worthy addition to millennia of writing that considers what it means to age and to pass from our earthly bodies."—New York Journal of Books
"Gerber’s poems acknowledge both the fragility of the times we live in and how very much alive we still are."—Santa Barbara Independent
"After a lifetime of poems that attend to and celebrate the greater-than-human world, Gerber confesses there was a time when 'I had no sense / the trees and animals / I walked among were something / I was not.' It’s this kind of intimacy and humility—a recognition we are one among many species, all related to one another—that informs such aphoristic lines as 'Ages ago, I surrendered to nature so this / page could be here and not be blank.' This is a book of gratitude that bows to the miraculous mystery of existence, the poet’s heartbeat 'chanting thank you, thank you, thank you without quite / caring who you was.'"—Orion
“Encounters with the natural world fill the verses of The End of Michelangelo. . . . Many verses here can be characterized by a mindfulness, or full consciousness, of the present moment. “Mono no aware” (the title is a Japanese term for awareness of the impermanence of things) is one of the standouts, describing the poet’s own experience of life as ‘a silent, / second actor in / every closely watched scene.’ Other poems acknowledge themselves as vain attempts to catch at the ungraspable; time and again, Gerber mentions ‘this fleeting identity’ or ‘our fleeting selves.’ Nothing here is monumentalized in an ode to permanence. . . . The End of Michelangelo initially suggests a funereal theme, but there’s far more life than death here. And age is no tragedy. . . . ‘’Rue, not rage,’ he quotes Samuel Menashe on the book’s final page, is what focuses his attention and fuels his creativity. Evening may be approaching, but there is more day to dawn.”—Las Vegas Review of Books
"This is Dan Gerber at his most celebratory and most deliberate, embodying the beauty and belief of poetry’s power and purpose, particularly in desperate times; poetry that alerts us to living fully and completely as 'some beacon of delight / with the sadness of things'."—Minderbinder Review of Books
Praise for Dan Gerber
“Dan
Gerber tenderly reels his readers through the ‘beautiful movie’ he calls the
passing of time on earth in a language completely unadorned and Zen-like in its
quietude. The thing itself carries the weight of these poems, which recall the
deep imagery of Vallejo, Neruda and Wright.” —Rain Taxi
“Via
delicious imagery, masterful pacing, and long-sanded language, Gerber…
maintains a continual curiosity and gentleness of spirit despite his keen
awareness of the world’s inevitable horrors.”—Orion
“Where
Gerber really starts to differentiate is in his approach: he frequently focuses
with sustained intensity on something fairly ordinary or easily observed until
it leads him to the unseen or not so easily discerned. He is really a
metaphysical poet in physical garb.”—World Literature Today
“The
clear directness of Dan Gerber’s poetry has distinguished it since I began
reading it. The purity of his language and the sharpness of his attention
present landscape, event, and feeling as one.” —W.S. Merwin
“Gerber
has a gentle touch and an unaffected, articulate voice that can be smart,
funny, wise—sometimes all at the same time.” —Library Journal
“These
are beautiful meditative poems of surprise and wonder fully engaged with the
world of experience, which he regards with a sacramental reverence.” —Society
of Midland Authors Book of the Year Award in Poetry
“[Gerber’s]
poetry explores everyday experiences and images, successfully converting them
into something unique and magical.” —Library of Michigan
“Mindfulness,
seeing things as they really are, both beauty and ugliness, informs the
authentic life, and defines the aesthetic response to that life.”—Poetry
East
“[Gerber]
is one of the most adept and accessible of the poets who explore the meaning of
humans, relation with earth and existence itself.” —Foreword
