Dan Gerber

Dan Gerber’s eighth collection of poetry, Sailing through Cassiopeia, richly layers and evokes the elegance of the commonplace with meditations on how to love a world that is beautiful but also monstrous. Though his work is illuminated by a range of masters—from those of the Chinese canon to Rainer Maria Rilke and Wallace Stevens—Gerber’s voice is entirely his own. With a profound sense of history, philosophy, and poetics, he honors an immediate yet ever-changing world and its endangered landscapes.

Sailing through Cassiopeia

Zen-like attention--to nature and the human heart--is the through-line in Particles, the life-work of a rare American poet.

New and Selected Poems

Particles

Dan Gerber is a master of layered, bittersweet clarity and subtle allusion. In his seventh book of poems, he writes about the residue of childhood misgivings and fears, the oak savannah landscape of California’s central coast, and his near-mystical relationship with the natural world. His poems read as if he sees Jeffers’s hawks, walks Machado’s hills, and answers Rilke’s call to change your life.

A Primer on Parallel Lives

Reading the poetry of Dan Gerber, we are summoned to this larger truth: Though we live in fraught times, on the tipping point of human self-destruction, we and our planet are still very much alive. In one of his last sonnets, nearly five hundred years ago, Michelangelo Buonarroti confronted the paradox of our earthly existence: “Why beauty mixed with terror, feeds so strangely my desire.” Reading The End of Michelangelo, we are similarly reminded that the very fact of being alive—experiencing our fleeting, fragile existence—is our only source of joy, our only avenue of consolation. These are poems that wake us up, revivify our desire to go on living despite our times, to counter our times; if poetry has a purpose, it may be exactly this. As T.H. White suggests, we can't save our world if we don't first savor it. “Dan Gerber tenderly reels his readers through the ‘beautiful movie’ he calls the passing of time on Earth, in a language completely unadorned and Zen-like in its quietude. The thing itself carries the weight off these poems that recall the deep imagery of Vallejo, Neruda, and Wright.” —Rain Taxi

The End of Michelangelo

"This collection of poems by a young American poet concerns itself with cycles of return; often they return us to points of departure; sometimes they take us beyond origin through the spiral of prehistory. What the reader has to deal with in 'The revenant' is the dizziness of velocity and the recurrent themes of light and shadow, and how those themes break forth in song"--From back cover.

The Revenant

"Gerber has a gentle touch and an unaffected, articulate voice that can be smart, funny, wise—sometimes all at the same time."—Library Journal "[Gerber] is one of the most adept and accessible of the poets who explore the meaning of humans' relation with earth and existence itself."—ForeWord Into a frenzied world that hurtles ever faster somewhere, Dan Gerber's poetry offers a necessary and reflective presence. Drawing upon eight previous collections, and including a book-length selection of new poems, this retrospective tunes its senses to the natural world and a provenance that includes the influence of Buddhism, English Romanticism, and a deep reading of Rainer Maria Rilke's oeuvre. Pastoral and expansive, Gerber's poetry is concerned with the universe just outside each of our windows—the immediately viewable landscape in front of us and the mysterious vastness beyond. From "Dark Matter": The visible drapes itself around the invisible, the way my jacket takes its shape from my shoulders. An unseen gravity whirls near the center of our galaxy, an unseen heart near the center of the bodies in which we desire. I seldom think of Neptune out there, way beyond my pointing to it on a summer night . . . Dan Gerber is the author of eight collections of poetry, three novels, a book of short stories, and two books of nonfiction. A former professional race-car driver, he has traveled extensively as a journalist, particularly in Africa. He lives in Santa Ynez, California.

Dan Gerber

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