New & Selected Poems

Stephen Berg

Stephen Berg has been among the most original, passionate, and vigorous writers of a gifted generation. This intimate collection of new and selected poems displays an evocative authority, filled with range, daring, and brilliant energy. As The New York Times so accurately pointed out: “We need poets like this.”

Paperback: $12.00 list price

Bookshop Amazon

Hardcover $21.00 list price

Bookshop Amazon
Receive this book as a gift when you donate.

ISBN: 9781556590436

Format: Paperback

ISBN: 9781556590443

Format: Hardcover

Last Meeting

I was helpless, my breasts were freezing.
I walked one foot on tiptoe,
I put my left glove on
my right hand, like an idiot.

There seemed to be so many steps then
but I knew there were only three.
Autumn whispered through the maples
“Die, like me:

that sick, truculent liar, Fate,
has stripped me, for the hell of it.”
“I’ve been flayed like you,” I remember answering
as I left, “and I’ll die when you do.”

This is our last meeting—this place, this voice.
I looked back at the shape of the dark house.
Candles guttered in the bedroom window;
behind them, eyes and a torso.

About the Author

Stephen Berg (1934–2014) was the founder and co-editor of The American Poetry Review and the editor, with Robert Mezey, of the highly acclaimed Naked Poetry anthologies. He was the author of numerous collections of poetry and translations and received the Frank O’Hara Prize, a Columbia University Translation Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim, Pew, Rockefeller, and Dietrich foundations, as well as from the National Endowment for the Arts. He taught at Princeton and Haverford, and was a professor of humanities …

Read more

Reviews

“Stephen Berg is a well-kept secret… Berg plies the reader’s attention with simplicity and candor.” —American Bookseller

“[New & Selected Poems] is big and beautiful… We are fortunate that Copper Canyon has emerged as such a strong and steady source of the best and best-presented poems around.” —Dan McGuiness, Antioch Review

“To console is the noble aim of this poet, and this he does with a keen understanding and with grace.” —American Book Review

“This is a major assessment of a truly visionary poet who has been among the most passionate, vigorous, and original writers/translators of a gifted generation.” —Bookpaper

“A masterful piece of writing. It is the human laid bare.” —Hayden Carruth

“Berg is at ease with himself, uncommonly candid and attentive to detail… This hefty volume collects work from four books and 20 years, yet reads as though it were composed in a single sitting. The new poems included are a particular delight, especially those from a work-in-progress of prose pieces that are sharp, thoughtful, and wonderfully wild.” —Library Journal

“New & Selected Poems eschews theatrics and doctrine in favor of concentrating on the basic roots of human existence. The result is a personally charged yet socially aware style that views a wondrous but oftentimes sad world.” —City Pages

“We need poets like this. Mr. Berg relentlessly describes what we would often prefer to forget but can’t allow ourselves to forget. To forget our very nature means to repeat our many blunders over and over again.” —New York Times Book Review

“Stephen Berg is, precisely, a mainline plain-style poet… one of the defining voices of that style… Berg is a poet who steeps himself in life, palps it with sadness and wonder… What really characterizes him is the centrality of his vision… and the amplitude of his concerns.” —Poetry Flash

“Berg’s interest is in the life of the emotions, and in the particulars of a life that have been taken inside the self… [Berg] is afraid of neither delicacy or harshness. If you are one of those readers who still thinks poetry should tell what it is like to be alive, then this is a book you should own.” —Passages North