Praise for Perdido
“In the poems of Perdido an ideal is developed, which is ached for by the characters and by us. The book sheds its skin of loss and forms a cocoon ready to deal with ‘the ping of forever’ or to react to ‘a plastic acrid bird of fire lifted into the air.’ I’m not sure whether the book breaks or soothes the hearts of those involved. It’s a contemporary myth I haven’t seen before. You should read it.”
“On every page of this book, Bert Stern sounds the tragic-comic note of a master. And from this double plane of regard, his poems are as aglitter with gaiety as they are alive to the tears of things.”
“Bert Stern’s poems are rare vessels of encounter, necessity, and vacancy, splendid visions of a blessed world where life is both given and taken away. Stern finds life and immediacy in birds and leaves, mountains, rivers and mist, and he makes himself available to these objects to the degree where he can say, I am so naked that I have no skin. These are the poems of an aged man who is widely engaged in his world and all it imparts.”
About the Author
Co-founder of Off the Grid Press, Bert Stern is the author of two previous poetry collections, Silk/The Ragpicker’s Grandson and Steerage, as well as the critical book Wallace Stevens: Art of Uncertainty, and Winter in China, a monograph on American expatriate Robert Winter. He is Milligan Professor of English Emeritus at Wabash College, and has also taught at the University of Thessaloniki as Fulbright Professor of English and at Peking University. Stern served as chief editor for Hilton Publishing, and for fifteen years taught for Changing Lives through Literature, a program designed for men and women on probation. He lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.
