Sailing through Cassiopeia

"Gerber has a gentle touch and an unaffected, articulate voice that can be smart, funny, wise-sometimes all at the same time."-Library Journal

"The thing itself carries the weight of [Gerber's] poems, which recall the deep imagery of Vallejo, Neruda, and Wright."-Rain Taxi

Dan Gerber's mastery of layered imagery and crystalline vision marry European Romanticism with American Zen. These meditative poems engage the natural landscape of California's oak savannas and memories of childhood, while calling upon an array of literary progenitors-from Robinson Jeffers and Rainer Maria Rilke to the classics of the Chinese canon-exploring what it means to be linguistically alive in an animal world. As ForeWord magazine wrote, "Dan Gerber's poems are quick, graceful, alert to their surroundings, and rarely wasting a motion."

"The Word is the Picture of Things"

Looking down at the lights of Earth,
its constellations of lives,
however unaware,
signal back to the watching galaxies
that have their seeing inside us.

I praised flight and got stuck.
I praised gravity and got lost.

*Along the way my life

decays, and ripens . . .*

Dan Gerber is the author of seven collections of poetry, three novels, a book of short stories, and two books of nonfiction. A former racecar driver, he has traveled extensively as a journalist, particularly in Africa. His books have earned a Michigan Author Award and the Mark Twain Award. He lives in Santa Ynez, California.

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