Galaxy Love by Gerald Stern (review)

“Don’t ever think of Coney Island / where the rabbits once ran wild” Gerald Stern notes in “Blue Particles,” conjuring a part of New York City once supposedly populated by wild rabbits. Despite their rootedness in domestic places, the poems in Galaxy Love—like “the long and noisy ride through Brooklyn” to Manhattan that leads to “the Dutch freighter that delivered you to Antwerp / then the Gare du Nord”—straddle the America of the poet’s youth and the Europe of his formative years. Reading them, it turns out, is somewhat like riding the Cyclone in Luna Park, though at times more unsettling.

In Galaxy Love Stern, now in his nineties, is, as he always has been, wistful and wild. His wisdom is thinly veiled in wit (which is often veiled, less thinly, in rage). This keeps the poems from turning didactic or—God forbid it—predictable. As avuncular as Stern’s conversational speaker might appear, there is in the lyrics made of his mind’s seemingly arbitrary meanderings some of Travis Bickle’s moralizing and some of Jake LaMotta’s stalking. One might pause at the reference to “Adolf Hitler’s good friend Charles Lindbergh” in “Space and Time” if he or she has not, a few pages earlier, read in the conclusion of “Bio VII,”

Ritsos was burying his poems and swallowing his beautiful pencils.

General Electric was producing tanks with low-lying cannon mostly for the knees just a friendly warning.

The rhetorical mischief one has become accustomed to in Stern’s volumes is ever-present here. In the title poem, for instance, “I turn the light off with the right / hand and gather you in close with the wrong” and in “Today It’s Easter,” “I’m no longer an / anarchist, I’m a liberal radical east coast / socialist prophet-adoring Debs-living Yid….” One senses from the book a poet who not only unequivocally enjoys composing but is also able, informed by a lifetime of experience, to readily distil into poems—in an idiom that is the colloquial unhinged— potent concoctions of recollections of encounters with people, art, and literature. Among many others, Ezra Pound (“Bio VIII,” “Bollingen Ezra Pound, 1949,” “Orson,” “Gelato”), Dylan Thomas (“Miami,” “Main Bridge,” “Orson”), Yiannis Ritsos (“Bio VII,” “Ritsos”), W. B. Yeats (“Les Fleurs,” “Mad Ireland Drove Him into Poetry”), William Empson (“Les Fleurs”), W. S. Merwin (“Merwin”), Robert Burns (“A Walk Back from the Restaurant”), Samuel Greenberg (“KGB, The Reading”), and Johnny Mercer and Hoagy Carmichael (both in “Skylark”) are all offhandedly summoned—and some (such as Pound) just as readily dismissed.

Orson Welles (“my philosopher” and “the No. 1 saint of the sinners of old Hollywood” in “Orson”) appears three times. In “Visit from Mars,” Nostradamus, who “predicted the visit from Mars, orchestrated by Orson Welles in 1938 / in the town of Grover’s Mill, near Princeton,” leads—by way of the infamous radio broadcast, to which Stern recounts his parents listening while preparing for an outing—to a local Jewish émigré:

Einstein himself was interviewed while walking the mulberry streets, especially the right-hand side of Great Road, going south, where the houses are windy and overpriced, and he was full of denial that anyone with a radio antenna sticking out of his head had been seen in any diner or hardware store, Einstein whose bushy face had rubbed many a pair of reddened lips, Einstein whose famous name they stole for bagels.

Besides Stern’s perennial preoccupation with matters Jewish, which inform many of his poems here and elsewhere, other biographical undercur-rents present in earlier poems are also reinforced here. One, particularly significant, touches on the development of the artist. “Mad Ireland Drove Him into Poetry” begins by insinuating what makes a poet, what draws him or her to an exacting craft:

It could just as well have been the Spanish Flu or the Potato Famine or maybe just boredom.

For Roethke and Kunitz on old 611 it was the father—in one case, abandonment, the other, oppression.

In my case—so I think— it...