Kirjahaku

"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"Gerber's got a Spanish soul. A bloody, dusty, old Spanish soul. He's got Machado, Lorca, and Jim nez all rolled up in him. And when he does the lyric, or the meditative, it speaks to the universe and to us."--Line BreakDan Gerber is a master of layered, bittersweet imagery. In his seventh book of poems, he writes of childhood misgivings and fears, the oak savannah landscape of California's central coast, and a near-mystical relationship with nature. As novelist John Nichols once wrote of Gerber's poetry, "Dan Gerber has an exquisitely muted, yet profound understanding of tragedy, love, family, and the haunting vagaries of nature." "Some Distance" I wanted to be a stone in the field, simply that, and then I wanted to be the grass around it, and then the cattle grazing under the too blue sky, and then the blue, which has of itself no substance, and yet goes on and on and on. Dan Gerber is the author of a dozen books of poetry, fiction, essays, and memoir. He has earned the Mark Twain Award, Book of the Year honors from ForeWord Magazine, and inclusion in The Best American Poetry. He lives in Santa Ynez, California.

Dan Gerber is one of our finest living poets. --Annie Dillard"The poems in Dan Gerber's latest collection, Sailing through Cassiopeia, exist in a lyrical remove from time. 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 "As quiet and modest in their display as his poems sometimes seem, their agenda is bold. Gerber, the author of seven collections of poetry that from the beginning lovingly render physical detail, believes that something of great significance occurs when an object is rightly seen.... 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"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 "In Sailing through Cassiopeia Gerber's decades of apprenticeship are palpable in a book so stunning--so tenderly branching into the world even as it tunnels inward--that it is difficult to put down." --George Kalamaras, Rain TaxiGerber has a gentle touch and an unaffected, articulate voice that can be smart, funny, wise--sometimes all at the same time.--Library JournalDan Gerber's mastery of layered imagery and crystalline vision marry European Romanticism with American Zen. These meditative poems engage the natural landscape of California's oak savannas and memories of childhood, while calling upon an array of literary progenitors--from Robinson Jeffers and Rainer Maria Rilke to the classics of the Chinese canon--exploring what it means to be linguistically alive in an animal world. As ForeWord magazine wrote, Dan Gerber's poems are quick, graceful, alert to their surroundings, and rarely wasting a motion.The Word is the Picture of ThingsLooking down at the lights of Earth, its constellations of lives, however unaware, signal back to the watching galaxiesthat have their seeing inside us.I praised flight and got stuck.I praised gravity and got lost.Along the way my life decays, and ripens . . . Dan Gerber is the author of seven collections of poetry, three novels, a book of short stories, and two books of nonfiction. A former racecar driver, he has traveled extensively as a journalist, particularly in Africa. His books have earned a Michigan Author Award and the Mark Twain Award. He lives in Santa Ynez, California.

Gerber has a gentle touch and an unaffected, articulate voice that can be smart, funny, wise--sometimes all at the same time.--Library Journal Gerber] is one of the most adept and accessible of the poets who explore the meaning of humans' relation with earth and existence itself.--ForeWordInto a frenzied world that hurtles ever faster somewhere, Dan Gerber's poetry offers a necessary and reflective presence. Drawing upon eight previous collections, and including a book-length selection of new poems, this retrospective tunes its senses to the natural world and a provenance that includes the influence of Buddhism, English Romanticism, and a deep reading of Rainer Maria Rilke's oeuvre. Pastoral and expansive, Gerber's poetry is concerned with the universe just outside each of our windows--the immediately viewable landscape in front of us and the mysterious vastness beyond.From Dark Matter: The visible drapes itself around the invisible, the way my jacket takes its shape from my shoulders.An unseen gravity whirlsnear the center of our galaxy, an unseen heart near the centerof the bodies in which we desire.I seldom think of Neptune out there, way beyondmy pointing to it on a summer night . . .Dan Gerber is the author of eight collections of poetry, three novels, a book of short stories, and two books of nonfiction. A former professional race-car driver, he has traveled extensively as a journalist, particularly in Africa. He lives in Santa Ynez, California.

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