"I sold them at Baker's and Burt's / and carried the boxes on high"--but he also knows that few items of everyday use better symbolize the travails men and women face on the path of life than the footwear they don every morning. A homely symbol, to be sure, but all the more touching--and revealing--for that (think of that "split tongue").What holds Stern's work together, both the individual poems and the collection as a whole, is its idiosyncratic tone and turns of phrase, at once demotic and prophetic, a kind of plaintive hectoring.
from Frank Wilson: Philadelphia Inquirer: 'Save the Last Dance,' by Gerald Stern
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