In Beauty Bright: Poems

By Gerald Stern and Dean Acheson

Book Overview

The lyric poems of In Beauty Bright, although marked by the same passion and swiftness as Gerald Stern's previous work, move into an area of knowledge--even wisdom--that reflects a long life of writing, teaching, and activism. They are poems of grief and anger, but the music is delicate and moving.

from In Beauty Bright:

In beauty-bright and such it was like Blake's
lily and though an angel he looked absurd
dragging a lily out of a beauty-bright store
wrapped in tissue with a petal drooping,
nor was it useless--you who know it know
how useful it is--and how he would be dead
in a minute if he were to lose it though
how do you lose a lily?

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393348946
• ISBN13: 9780393348941
• Release Date: April 2014
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 128 Pages
• Weight: 0.26 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.5" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Fragments of a great life

Dean Acheson was secretary of state for Harry Truman. He had a brilliant mind, wrote like Voltaire and was perfectly educated. For instance, you cannot read nowadays memoirs of anybody who knew Winston Churchill without reading about Winston's drinking. Acheson does not do that: it is not his style: he would rather let you ponder the deep meaning of a joke that Winston played on Eden (this in Sketches from life, part of his memoirs). This little book of fragments gives a glimpse of how he reacted to the death of Kennedy and the rise of the 60s generation. "We have lived, he says, in the barren years of disillusionment-years when the cry was: What is the truth?"For people who like history and refined expression of thought.