Blessed as We Were: Late Selected and New Poems, 2000-2018

For five decades, Gerald Stern has been writing his own brand of expansive, deep-down American poetry. Now in his nineties, this “sometimes comic, sometimes tragic visionary” (Edward Hirsch) engages a lifetime of memories in his poems, blending philosophical, wide-ranging intellect with boisterous wit. Memory unites the poems in , which reach back through seven collections written over almost two decades. Stern explores casual miracles, relationships, and the natural world in (2000); offers a satirical and redemptive vision in (2005) and (2008); meditates on the metamorphosis of aging in (2012); and captures the sensual joys of life—even when they are far in the past—in the wistful love poems and elegies of (2017). The volume concludes with over two dozen new poems that combine the metaphysical with the domestic, from the passage of time and the cost of love to the profound banality of cardboard and its uses. With his characteristic exuberant, oracular voice animating every line, Stern reminds us why he is one of the great American poets, one who has long “been telling us that the best way to live is not so much for poetry, but through poetry” ( ).