What I Can't Bear Losing: Notes from a Life

Stern, Gerald

ISBN 10: 0393058182 / ISBN 13: 9780393058185

Published by W. W. Norton & Company, 2003

About this Item

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Bibliographic Details

• Title: What I Can't Bear Losing: Notes from a Life
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication Date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393058182
• ISBN 13: 9780393058185
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: Good

About this title

Synopsis

A time now almost lost―America and Europe of the 1940s and 1950s―indelibly recalled in prose pieces by a celebrated poet.

In a series of freewheeling rambles that combine autobiography and meditation, Gerald Stern explores significant and representative events in his life. He describes the dour Sundays of Calvinist Pittsburgh, punctuated by his parents' weekly battles. We have glimpses of him as a wilderness camp counselor, and later, having been declared 4-F, as a postwar draftee (a stint that includes jail). In the 1950s he savors the romance of Paris. Stern also tells of being shot in Newark―the bullet is still in his neck to prove it. Other scenes include being mistaken for Allen Ginsberg and encounters with Andy Warhol. And in the ineffably tender "The Ring," Stern recalls his mother's second engagement ring, "when they were a bit richer, if a bit broader and a bit more weary."

As in his poetry, Stern discovers his subject as he goes along, relishing that discovery and expanding on it. There is no other voice like Gerald Stern's, funny and reflective and opinionated―and forgiving.

About the Author

Gerald Stern (1925―2022), the author of nineteen volumes of poetry, was awarded the National Book Award, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the National Jewish Book Award, and the Wallace Stevens Award, among many other honors.