Trying to Catch the Horses - Softcover

Gerber, Dan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0870135341 ISBN 13: 9780870135347

Publisher: Michigan State University Press, 1999

Synopsis

Dan Gerber's Trying to Catch the Horses is his first full-length collection since his highly acclaimed selected poems, A Last Bridge Home, published in 1992. Many of these fifty-eight poems have appeared in the finest literary magazines and anthologies, including Poetry, New Letters, The Ohio Review, and The Best American Poetry 1999, selected by Robert Bly.
     Long recognized as a meditative poet with an almost mystical connection to animals and the natural world, Gerber begins this collection with a quote from Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh: "Contemplate seeing your bodily form present before you―in the trees, the grass and leaves, the river." In the manner of Rilke and Juan Ramón Jiménez, Gerber's unadorned poems are acts of discovery, inviting us into a place deep within ourselves through a conversation between human consciousness and the consciousness of things. In the title poem "Trying to Catch the Horses," the poet achieves his apparent goal not through will or ambition, but by letting go, to become "a clump of grass they (the horses) must graze," and to reach up and touch "the sky itself as far as it goes." In two of the book's most riveting poems, Gerber focuses his imagination on both our century's World Wars, envisioning a burst of shrapnel as a flight of blackbirds, and questions the entire enterprise of a great battle in the Pacific and how "we never thought / of fish in the sea and how / this was their home though not their war...."
     Whether Gerber writes about horses or war, hiking a canyon or encountering a wolf, his backdrop is a profound silence against which these poems become necessary song.

About this title

About the Author:

Dan Gerber was born and grew up in western Michigan and received his bachelor's degree from Michigan State University in 1962. He has worked as a corporate executive, an automobile dealer, a professional racing driver, and a high school teacher. From 1968 through 1972, with Jim Harrison, he co-edited the literary magazine Sumac. He has traveled extensively as a journalist, particularly in Africa. He has been writer-in-residence at Michigan State University and Grand Valley State College and has lectured, read, and taught at numerous colleges, universities, libraries, schools, and museums throughout the United States and England. He and his wife, Debbie, divide their year between central California and southeastern Idaho.

Dan Gerber has published three novels, a short-story collection and six books of poems, including A Last Bridge Home; New Selected Poems and Trying to Catch the Horses. He was the recipient of the Michigan Author Award in 1992, had work selected for inclusion in Best American Poetry 1999, and received the Mark Twain Award for Distinguished Contributions to Midwestern Literature in 2001.

Review:

Adrift
Advice From The Burglar
The Bear On Main Street
Blackbirds
Blizzard On Dayton Street 2:00 A.m.
Calm Spring Hours
Clouds
The Cool Earth
Cornhawks
Counting Treasures
The Crow
Dust
Elements
Endless Rain
Express
A Face At The Window
The Favorite Child
Flight
For Isabel
Franz Kline's Dream
A Geography Of Being
Grouse
In The Still Night
Just Before He Died
Lost On The Mountain Above Snake Creek
The March Of Time
My Father's Fields
On My Walk
On The Broad Prairie
One Day Near Marilal
One Drop Of Crocodile
Photo Of A Park In Prague
Pleasures
Plum Rain
Psalm
Quite By Chance
Remembering To Breath
The River Seen From Above
Sexual
Side Effects
Smoke
Sometimes
South Of Marrakech
Sovereign
Spirit Harness
A Sport Almost
Spring Song In Key West
Storm Warning
Tarawa
The Time Of The Hoppers
The Tongue In Praise Of Itself
A Tree On The Prairie In Mid-october
The Trees, The Grass, The Leaves, The River
Trust Account
Trying To Catch The Horses
Under The Great Sky
Walking Out Alone
Wild Horses
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

Dan Gerber is an unique poet. More than any of his contemporaries he immediately makes the relatively ordinary a transcendent state. His work is completely untarnished by fad or fashion and I enter it again and again with a sense of wonderment. When our age passes, this work will remain. -- Jim Harrison

Dan Gerber is one of our finest living poets. I've loved his powerful, thought-provoking poems for well over two decades, and I find his new collection, Trying to Catch the Horses, even more subtle and engaging than his previous books. There's a penetrating and sometimes quirky sensibility at work here, handling violence and beauty with equal respect. In an unembellished language that calls our attention to the world and to its beings rather than to its own virtuosity, these poems credit the reader with intelligence and feeling and ring clear against an essential backdrop of silence. -- Annie Dillard

About this edition

• Publisher: Michigan State University Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0870135341
• ISBN 13: 9780870135347
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 69