[(Sailing Through Cassiopeia)] [Author: Dan Gerber] published on

by Dan Gerber

"Gerber has a gentle touch and an unaffected, articulate voice that can be smart, funny, wise—sometimes all at the same time."—Library Journal"The thing itself carries the weight of [Gerber's] poems, which recall the deep imagery of Vallejo, Neruda, and Wright."—Rain TaxiDan 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 Things"Looking 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 lifedecays, 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.

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

First published November 13, 2012

Reviews

[Keifer May · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a read. Gerber seems to locate the three poles of this book around the imagery and type of poems. As the book goes on Gerber shifts from the understated, colloquial aura that mirrors Wang Wei or Tu Fu and takes on a more modern or surrealistic tone that plays with wilder language and images. But there is an unrelenting meditation around the human space (and where is that?) in comparison to our surroundings and the empirical world. I really felt my mind clicking around these poems.

I will definitely be reading this again and I urge you to read it!

[Dylan]

I'm reading through Lithub's 365 Books to Start Your Climate Change Library, a reading list in four sections (Classics, Science, Fiction & Poetry, and Ideas). This book is #11 of Part 3: Fiction & Poetry and #29 overall.

Really good.

"One and One Make One"
Flitting between them,
for hours now,
the spotted towhee can't decide
which of the two birds
in the two
glass panels,
in each of the two
French doors,
he's more in love with.

From "Drive Home"
"The world is suffering."
Say it twice, and it's not the same
suffering.
"The world is suffering."

From "The Dark Is Always At The Top"
Every day we bear up under
the liminal weight of air,
a million pounds and more,
in tiny increments
because we've grown used to it,
like the heat of our own blood
we remark only in a fever
or in the bodies of others.

[Nathan Bartos · Rating 3 out of 5]

Maybe it’s the fact that he’s of the Gerber Baby fortune, but I couldn’t get over how pretentious and out of touch his writing came across.

[Mercedes · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.8/5

[Ambrose Miles · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dan Gerber has quickly become one of my favorite poets. I’m especially fond of the poem on page 36, Postscript.

[World Literature Today]

"Gerber at his best sets the bar for his other poems, and the collection is uneven in this regard. Still, Gerber’s poems are authentic, and there are plenty of passages and poems in this book to reward reading." - Fred Dings, University of South Carolina

This book was reviewed in the May 2014 issue of World Literature Today. To read the full review, visit our website: http://bit.ly/1qbaYBC