Kirjahaku

Dan Gerber's Trying to Catch the Horses is his first full-length collection since his highly acclaimed selected poems, A Last Bridge Home, published in 1992.Many of these fifty-eight poems have appeared in the finest literary magazines and anthologies. Long recognized as a meditative poet with an almost mystical connection to animals and the natural world, Gerber begins this collection with a quote from Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh: "Contemplate seeing your bodily form present before you - in the trees, the grass and leaves, the river".In the manner of Rilke and Juan Ramón Jiménez, Gerber's unadorned poems are acts of discovery, inviting us into a place deep within ourselves through a conversation between human consciousness and the consciousness of things. In the title poem "Trying to Catch the Horses", the poet achieves his apparent goal not through will or ambition, but by letting go, to become "a clump of grass they (the horses) must graze", and to reach up and touch "the sky itself as far as it goes". In two of the book's most riveting poems, Gerber focuses his imagination on both our century's World Wars, envisioning a burst of shrapnel as a flight of blackbirds, and questions the entire enterprise of a great battle in the Pacific and how "we never thought / of fish in the sea and how / this was their home though not their war...".Whether Gerber writes about horses or war, hiking a canyon or encountering a wolf, his backdrop is a profound silence against which these poems become necessary song.

This book brings together the best of Dan Gerber's previously published essays and magazine stories, many of which have appeared in magazines such as Outside, Playboy, Sports Afield, and Sports Illustrated, with several new pieces. Gerber lends his experience as a professional racing driver, journalist, sailor, and fisherman with a poet's eye and a novelist's gift for narrative, believing, as he states in his introduction, that our truest lives must be imagined.New essays in this collection include a meditative journal on the Arctic and an in-depth interview in which Gerber discusses the relationship of his artistic life with that as an explorer of the natural world. Also included are a gripping account of his return to racing thirty-three years after his career-ending crash, a story about saving his own life in the African desert by introducing a clan of Rendili warriors to ice, a chronicle of his pursuit of the most elusive fish in the world, and the story of a clandestine sailing trip to Cuba.His classic and highly praised book on the Indianapolis 500, the 'World's Fastest Carnival Ride', long out of print, is included here in its entirety. Blending Thoreau's dictum that "a writer is a traveller who stays at home", with Wallace Stevens's that "it is the worst of all things not to live in a physical world", Dan Gerber's focus is the inward experience of the outer world.

Lawrence Bancroft walks out on his father's funeral and his position as heir to a multimillion-dollar pie company. He wants to be a poet and pursues his dream across the length and breadth of America, serving up a portrait not only of the state of the nation but of a man in search of himself.

The varied inhabitants of Brainard, Michigan, examine their lives and losses in very distinct, matter-of-fact voices. A heart attack victim crashes into his brother-in-law’s funeral parlour in the title story; the deaf-mute of “Conversation” begins his tale with the simple sentence, “I don’t think I’ve really had a conversation with anyone since my father died”.Dan Gerber’s characters are capable of extraordinary compassion and everyday cruelty, and reveal themselves in an unnerving series of layers.

Now back in print, this novel is one of Dan Gerber's triumphs. From the author of American Atlas, Out of Control, and Grass Fires, Gerber's A Voice From the River followed Grass Fires to prominence on national bestseller lists. This novel once again affirms the Gerber's solid reputation for writing about the confrontation of the Spirit World and what some consider to be the Last of Days.