Save the Last Dance: Poems

Download or read book Save the Last Dance: Poems written by Gerald Stern and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2008-05-17 with total page 91 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fifteenth collection by a celebrated poet whose "terrific, boisterous energy has never flagged" (Megan Harlan, San Francisco Chronicle). In Save the Last Dance, Gerald Stern gives us a stunning collection of his intimately personal—yet always universal, and always surprising—poems, rich with humor and insight. Shorter lyric poems in the first two parts continue the satirical and often redemptive vision of his last collection, Everything Is Burning, while never failing to carve out new emotional territory. In the third part, a long poem called "The Preacher," Stern takes the book of Ecclesiastes as a starting point for a meditation on loss, futility, and emptiness, represented here by the concept of a "hole" that resurfaces throughout.