Grazing on Stars – Selected Poems
Steven Sher
Perfectbound paperback, ISBN: 978-0-9831251-7-4, 84 pgs., $15.95
Currently Out of Print
Steven Sher’s poems are rooted in Brooklyn, New York, where he grew up, and in the places across America where he has lived including Iowa, Kansas, Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Oregon’s Willamette Valley and North Carolina. He has studied with John Ashbery, and his precise use of words shows it. This selection of poems offers a varied sampling from his first thirty years of writing poetry. The poems appear in three sections, each one covering roughly a ten-year period beginning in 1975. The poems in this collection first appeared in many of the best international literary magazines and subsequently in the following books by Steven Sher: The House of Washing Hands, The Skipping Stone, At the Willamette, Thirty-Six, Flying Through Glass, Traveler’s Advisory, Trolley Lives and Caught in the Revolving Door. Richly textured word tapestries infused with emotional invocations, Sher’s poems seek to transcend beyond the everyday into the spiritual realm.
“Steven Sher manages to transform the anomalies of daily living into something as rich and dense as a tapestry.” -John Ashbery
“There are tremors of realization…a strong feeling of location…a gust of feeling as I read.” -William Stafford
“Unabashedly emotional, this is poetry of the deepest sentiment, as full of moving truths as it is full of invention…” -Barry Wallenstein