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ADLER/ JEWISH POETRY’S QUANTUM LEAP
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timate portrayal o f he r relationship with her father. It con
cludes: “ . . . I though t/ that pain meant/I was not loved./It
meant I loved.” Prophetic in its message o f awakening, the poem
transfers the responsibility for love from the deity without, to
the God-ness within; loving is, as loving does. But the belief
system does not perm it dissolution. Self-analysis leads Gluck
back to the roots o f her estrangement, the pain o f separation:
a broken heart, manifested by the conditioning o f her faith.
Because o f he r enormous talent, one hopes that
Ararat
is a final
statement that will perm it Gluck to move forward from arche
typical stigma to a ripen ing o f deepe r cosmic awareness.
STERN ’S OUTPUT
Leaving Another Kingdom
(1990), a selection o f Gerald S te rn ’s
poetry over the past twenty years, provides an excellent opp o r
tunity for sampling the entire oeuvre o f one o f the coun try’s
most gifted poets. Stern is an en ter ta iner par excellence. Nu
ances are clever, language is original, and poems are both in
telligent and fertile with the same brilliant repartee among God,
ego, and guilt, tha t colors the prose o f Bernard Malamud and
Saul Bellow. Dour hum o r yields to long sprawled-out narratives
that insinuate themselves into mind-blocked arteries where
once-removed tenem en t images chu rn in a limbo o f pain and
self-deprecation.
On Jewish terms, reincarnation is a myth, and Stern the Jew
is forced to bite the dust and flesh o f human limitation. But
Stern the poet and gnostic has already transcended his Jewish
ness, and cannot allow himself to dismiss the possibility o f spir
itual transformation.
In his collection,
Lovesick
(1990), the poem “G rape fru it” be
gins:
I ’m eating breakfast even i f it means standing
in front of the sink and tearing at the
grapefruit,
even i f I ’m leaning over to keep the juices
away from my chest and stomach and even i f a
spider
is hanging from my ear and a wild flea
is crawling down my leg. My window is
wavy and dirty . . .