This Time: New and Selected Poems

"This healthy collection of new poems and selections from seven previous volumes is remarkable for its generosity of spirit, manifested in a warm surrealism that is often turned with humor toward his own past as a way of understanding the recurrent questions of growing old: Why did it take so long / for me to get lenient? What does it mean one life / only? " -- <em>Publishers Weekly</em> (starred review) "Gerald Sterns achievement is immense. In this beautiful gathering . . . one encounters a poet who praises and mourns in turn and even at once." -- Grace Schulman, <em>The Nation</em> "Stern is one of those rare poetic souls who makes it almost impossible to remember what our world was like before his poetry came to exalt it." -- C. K. Williams