[In the review of Odd Mercy below, Murphy describes Stern's poetic style.]

"I am at last that thing, a stranger in my own life": this incredibly sad statement sums up the tone of Gerald Stern's new book. The title of the poem, "Diary," is appropriate to these informal, loose, and sometimes shapeless poems. If the speaker of the poem is "completely comfortable getting in or getting out of [his] own Honda, / living from five cardboard boxes, two small grips, / and two briefcases," the sense of weightlessness seems to come from bereavement, not liberty. He says "I am ruined by the past"—not because of its horror, but because it is over. But if the content of memory is blotted out by its form (being over), remembering becomes indistinguishable from mourning; in writing about the artist Ad Reinhardt, known for his all-black paintings, Stern says "we loved gloom and believed / in clarity."

Birds and flowers are recurrent motifs—two symbols of beauty, fragility, and vulnerability. The birds are the kindred spirits of his pain. In "Hot Dog," a long poem sequence, the connection becomes obsessive, even grotesque:

          I remember the smell
     of dead birds when I lived in Pittsburgh, there was
     a certain rottenness, a sweetness, I would know
     somehow long in advance the smell was coming,
     and I would see it there, the broken wing,
     blood on the neck, a beak gone, or a leg gone;
     it was for me my loss.

At times, Stern's passage through grief becomes a free-fall, in which emotion overwhelms form, mixing everything up like a tornado:

          I never thought it through,
     I didn't think like that, I may have snorted
     and felt a rush inside, I know I got dizzy
     just standing, I know I had to walk to slow down,
     and when I was forty I held on to a wall
     to keep myself from falling—but I meant
     that I would let the wind pass through me, that I
     would feel my pulses pounding a little, not
     that I would see the Republic revived or see
     streets with dimes piled up or cigars pouring
     out of bedroom windows the way they did
     on Pine Street in Philadelphia when I dumped
     a box of stale smokes onto the stoop
     and the three men who were sitting there went wild
     with all those riches.

Hot Dog is the name of a streetperson; the other major figure is Whitman. But the poem's antecedent is less Whitman than Hart Crane—a desperate man looking for Whitman, in what has become a wasteland. Visiting the bard's house, Stern imagines him "thinking about his house / and the ugly church across the street," and "all that / coal smoke and soot and the sweet odor that blew / across the river from the huge house of shit / on the Philadelphia side." You wouldn't think it possible to miss these things, but in this bleak world, it is:

          the church
     is gone, there is a huge county jail
     across the way, the sweet smell of shit
     from Philadelphia is gone, the soot
     and smoke are gone, the ferry goes back and forth
     only to the new blue-and-white aquarium,
     and there is a thing called "Mickle Towers" two blocks
     down, and acres of grass now and empty bottles.