SOURCE: A review of Odd Mercy, in Poetry, Vol. CLXVII, No. 3, December, 1995, pp. 160-61.

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...