Save the Last Dance
Poems
2 February 2010
Description
The fifteenth collection by a celebrated poet whose “terrific, boisterous energy has never flagged” (Megan Harlan, San Francisco Chronicle).
In Save the Last Dance, Gerald Stern gives us a stunning collection of his intimately personal—yet always universal, and always surprising—poems, rich with humor and insight. Shorter lyric poems in the first two parts continue the satirical and often redemptive vision of his last collection, Everything Is Burning, while never failing to carve out new emotional territory. In the third part, a long poem called "The Preacher," Stern takes the book of Ecclesiastes as a starting point for a meditation on loss, futility, and emptiness, represented here by the concept of a "hole" that resurfaces throughout.
Reviews
"Stern writes with a gruff, seen-it-all knowingness and with the distillation, leaps, and pivots acquired over a long life of poetic practice." — Booklist
"With a deft though sometimes mischievous hand, [Stern] crafts scenes that are at once exotic and familiar." — Library Journal
"[Stern’s] strongest, strangest poems." — Publishers Weekly
Also By: Gerald Stern 
Blessed as We Were: Late Selected and New Poems, 2000-2018
Paperback, 2023
An illuminating and irascible compilation of selected and new poems from National Book Award winner Gerald Stern
Blessed as We Were: Late Selected and New Poems, 2000-2018
Hardback, 2021
Finalist for the 2021 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection
An illuminating and irascible compilation of selected and new poems from National Book Award winner Gerald Stern.
Blessed as We Were: Late Selected and New Poems, 2000-2018
E Book, 2020
An illuminating and irascible compilation of selected and new poems from National Book Award winner Gerald Stern
Galaxy Love: Poems
Paperback, 2019
“What a voice, what a bardic roll. [Stern’s] poetry is a lifelong act of love.”— Philadelphia Inquirer
Galaxy Love: Poems
E Book, 2017
“Pure movement of mind, passion, knowledge.”—Juan Felipe Herrera
