Gerald Stern, the author of seventeen poetry collections, has won the National Book Award, the National Jewish Book Award, the Ruth Lilly Prize, and the Wallace Stevens Award, among others. He lives in Lambertville, New Jersey. (Author photo by Martin J. Desht)
In this poignant and urgent collection—his eighteenth—the award-winning poet Gerald Stern reflects on aging and the humanity we all share. The lyric poems of In Beauty Bright, although marked by the same passion and swiftness as Stern's previous work, move into an area of knowledge—even wisdom—that reflects a long life of writing, teaching, and activism. They are poems of grief and anger, but the music is delicate and moving.
Stanley Kunitz called Stern "the wilderness of American poetry," and in this boundless work Stern paints vignettes of different characters in his neighborhood, grounding his work in a sense of place in the cities of New York and Pittsburgh. Rapturous, irascible, and deeply American, Stern's poetry is uniquely his own.
In Beauty BrightW. W. Norton
