SOURCE: A review of Odd Mercy, in Booklist, September 15, 1995, p. 132.

Below, Monaghan offers a positive review of Odd Mercy.

"st. Mark's"

Still like a child, isn't it?
Climbing up an iron staircase,
arguing with some Igor
over the broken lock,
letting my head hang into the sink,
rinsing my neck with cold water.
 
Like a wolf, wasn't it?
Or a dove that will never die.
Reading Propertius, trampling
the highest stars,
forcing my hands together,
touching the row of snow-capped garbage cans.
 
Swaybacked, wasn't it?
Dragging my wet feet
from one park to the other.
"Softened by time's consummate plash," isn't it?
Tulip of the pink forest.
Red-and-yellow swollen rainwashed tulip.

Gerald Stern, "St. Mark's," in New Yorker, Vol. LXXI, No. 2, March 6, 1995, p. 87.

Stern writes with enormous authority and intensity of the lot common to humanity—of aging and death, of the tenderness of love, of family and...