Trying to catch the horses : poems / by Dan Gerber.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Gerber, Dan, 1940-

Language:

English

Physical Description:

69 pages ; 22 cm

Place of Publication:

East Lansing : Michigan State University Press, [1999]

Summary:

Dan Gerber's Trying to Catch the Horses is his first full-length collection since his I highly acclaimed selected poems, A Last Bridge Home, published in 1992. Many of these fifty-eight poems have appeared in the finest literary magazines and anthologies, including Poetry, New Letters, The Ohio Review, and The Best American Poetry 1999, selected by Robert Bly.

Long recognized as a meditative poet with an almost mystical connection to animals and the natural world, Gerber begins this collection with a quote from Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh: "Contemplate seeing your bodily form present before you -- in the trees, the grass and leaves, the river." In the manner of Rilke and Juan Ram"n Jimenez, Gerber's unadorned poems are acts of discovery, inviting us into a place deep within ourselves through a conversation between human consciousness and the consciousness of things. In the title poem "Trying to Catch the Horses, " the poet achieves his apparent goal not through will or ambition, but by letting go, to become "a clump of grass they (the horses) must graze, " and to reach up and touch "the sky itself as far as it goes." In two of the book's most riveting poems, Gerber focuses his imagination on both our century's World Wars, envisioning a burst of shrapnel as a flight of blackbirds, and questions the entire enterprise of a great battle in the Pacific and how "we never thought / of fish in the sea and how / this was their home though not their war.... "

Whether Gerber writes about horses or war, hiking a canyon or encountering a wolf, his backdrop is a profound silence against which these poems become necessary song.

Contents:

Trying to catch the horses

Remembering to breathe

The trees, the grass, the leaves, the river

Tree on the prairie in mid-October

The crow

Sovereign

Side effects

Walking out alone

Grouse

Clouds

Elements

Storm warning

The time of the hoppers

On my walk

Cornhawks

Smoke

Counting treasures

Pleasures

On the broad prairie

Endless rain

The bear on Main Street

The river seen from above

Tarawa

Express

South of Marrakech

In the still night

One day near Marilal

Flight

Photo of a park in Prague

A geography of being

Under the great sky

Franz Kline's dream

Adrift

One drop of crocodile

Spring song in Key West

Calm spring hours

The cool earth

Blackbirds

Spirit harness

The march of time

Trust account

Just before he died

Psalm

For Isabel

Dust

Sometimes

A sport almost

Blizzard on Dayton Street 2:00 a.m.

Sexual

Advice from the burglar

The favorite child

The tongue in praise of itself

Lost on the mountain above Snake Creek

Quite by chance

Face at the window

Plum rain

My father's fields

Wild horses.

ISBN:

0870135341

OCLC:

41400661