The End of Michelangelo

Praise for The End of Michelangelo If poetry can lay claim to a healing or restorative power, it may well be found in Gerber's poetry. In this, his 10th collection (after Particles: New and Selected Poems), Gerber draws on personal memories and the Central California landscape to reveal the fleeting, everyday marvels which are always available to us if we pay enough attention. . . . The poet's Zen openness to nature attunes him to synthesize what he sees with what he feels through spare but immediate language, summing up his poetics in one concise sentence: 'Without poetry the visible and invisible/ worlds wouldn't be aware of each other.' VERDICT A timeless oasis of quietude in our contemporary maelstrom of uncertainty and apprehension, Gerber's poetry vividly reminds us that while 'the scale of pleasure ascends into terror.../ the pleasure is in being alive.'-Library Journal In the walk toward death's horizon or in the wake of death's intervention into our daily existence, we often turn to poems for consolation, for insight and illumination, as a tether to pull us across the chasm of loss and absence. The poems in Gerber's tenth book of poetry, The End of Michelangelo, are a fine and priceless gift, a worthy addition to millennia of writing that considers what it means to age and to pass from our earthly bodies. -New York Journal of Books This is Dan Gerber at his most celebratory and most deliberate, embodying the beauty and belief of poetry's power and purpose, particularly in desperate times; poetry that alerts us to living fully and completely as 'some beacon of delight / with the sadness of things'. -Minderbinder Review of Books Praise for Dan Gerber Gerber's poems acknowledge both the fragility of the times we live in and how very much alive we still are. -Santa Barbara Independent Dan Gerber tenderly reels his readers through the 'beautiful movie' he calls the passing of time on earth in a language completely unadorned and Zen-like in its quietude. The thing itself carries the weight of these poems, which recall the deep imagery of Vallejo, Neruda and Wright. -Rain Taxi Via delicious imagery, masterful pacing, and long-sanded language, Gerber... maintains a continual curiosity and gentleness of spirit despite his keen awareness of the world's inevitable horrors. -Orion Where Gerber really starts to differentiate is in his approach: he frequently focuses with sustained intensity on something fairly ordinary or easily observed until it leads him to the unseen or not so easily discerned. He is really a metaphysical poet in physical garb. -World Literature Today The clear directness of Dan Gerber's poetry has distinguished it since I began reading it. The purity of his language and the sharpness of his attention present landscape, event, and feeling as one. -W.S. Merwin Gerber has a gentle touch and an unaffected, articulate voice that can be smart, funny, wise-sometimes all at the same time. -Library Journal These are beautiful meditative poems of surprise and wonder fully engaged with the world of experience, which he regards with a sacramental reverence. -Society of Midland Authors Book of the Year Award in Poetry [Gerber's] poetry explores everyday experiences and images, successfully converting them into something unique and magical. -Library of Michigan Mindfulness, seeing things as they really are, both beauty and ugliness, informs the authentic life, and defines the aesthetic response to that life. -Poetry East [Gerber] is one of the most adept and accessible of the poets who explore the meaning of humans, relation with earth and existence itself. -Foreword