Layers of Life

Abstract

'r»: The Twenties Generation j*>« ^** Layers of Life Nicholas Birns Everything Is Burning Gerald Stern Norton http://www.wwnorton.com 96 pages; cloth, $23.95 Gerald Stern turned eighty in 2005. This makes him a member of perhaps the most talented and certainly the most productive generation in American poetic history: born in the 1920s, serving in World War II, and coming of intellectual age in the 1950s, ultimately to populate the rival Donald Allen and Mark Strand anthologies of forty years ago. Stern, though, is of a subset of this generation that did not follow its usual career trajectory, which included early emergence in the 1950s as heirs of T. S. Eliot, domination of the Yale Younger Poets award, and academic posts at prestigious universities. Like Samuel Menashe (who, like Stern, was born in 1925), this divergence from the customary generational curve gives the poet's life experience a unique flavor, which cannot help but infuse the poetry. Menashe's laconic plenitude, though, is very different from Stern's garrulous bonhomie. At this point in his career, Stern excels at conveying the layering of experience—for instance, a girl he once danced with at Birdlandhad a grandfather who must, Stern reckons, have been born before the Crimean War. As he does so often in Everything Is Burning, Stern unfolds multiple strata of memory within a single poem: This much I know, I walked through the scraggly wood behind the Italian restaurant on the highway south of Camden, my former girlfriend Joanne, her sister her white-haired mother, her niece Suzanne. And we were waiting there for dinner; Suzanne and I Walked over the glass and the burning rubbish. We are out of doors here not just literally but figuratively. We are in the realm of ordinary experience, not that of poetic refinement. Witness the deliberately unpretentious references to Italian restaurants and Camden, New Jersey, paralleled elsewhere in the book by references to worms and carp alongside the more conventional azaleas and maples. But ordinary experience is perceived in a keen, ramified way. The poem concludes "...my neck was crimson, Suzanne / was seeing the burned lilac, she was seven." An anticlimactic conclusion, one might surmise. What is not said, but what is definitely meant, is that (say) twenty years have passed, Suzanne is now (say) twenty-seven, the white-haired mother is probably dead, and the poet, presumably middle-aged already when this incident took place, is now seeing in memory what at the time seemed so adult and workaday as to be anything but epiphanic. The burning rubbish and burned lilac, at the time half-dingy, half-dangerous banalities from which Suzanne's mother wanted to protect her, now have the sense of being burned away by time, of "the fire that refines," and by the searing losses so evident in everyday life. We are not to assume tragedy— Suzanne has not died in the interim— but there is a sense of stunned realization that this experience is past, that it belongs to sealed history, an effect reproduced in a verbal way by the assonance at play in "Suzanne," "seven," and "crimson." Stern shows us that his poetic generation, even at eighty, still has something to reveal. Layers of memory are thus jolting in "Suzanne ," but not explicitly sad. Yet there is a lot of sadness in this book. Unlike so many poetry books, the title is not simply a cute conceit or a title or a line from one poem, but radiates throughout the entire book. Burning can be chemotherapy ("Linda getting ready for her fourth burning") or can represent painful losses; but burning can also have positive aspects, connoting creative destruction or ecstasy. What it adds up to is a kind of uncontrollable motility, a sense of something happening, vibrantly and outside human intention, all around us. "Everything is burning, did you notice?" the poet asks "Nero," a "king poodle," as he, with no cognitive choice in the matter, fiddles—but Nero is also a figure for the poet, who must, constitutionally , both acknowledge and avoid destruction. A leitmotif of this book is the death of Stern's older sister, Sylvia, who died at age nine in...