“Look, a poem either sends you a bill or writes you a check,” begins David Kirby in his review of Amy Gerstler’s Dearest Creature in The New York Times. He ends with: “In Amy Gerstler I trust.” David Kirby was my poetry professor in college. He wrote me a letter of recommendation for my application to the Bennington Writing Seminars, of which Amy Gerstler is also an alum. Have we both stood next to Robert Frost’s grave? Has she swam in Lake Paran? In a poem titled “The Bible as Literature,” Gerstler writes of a class where she learned “books on scrolls unfurl / in just one direction.” Not like a poet’s life; not like this poet’s life, and not like mine. In “Lost in the Forest,” the speaker, after starving in the woods for three days, finds a cottage and asks, “Have I stumbled / into the clutches of St. Somebody? / Who can tell,” and in “Doomsday”: “Darling, my mother / used to croon, you were a happy / accident, like the discovery / of penicillin.” Born in San Diego in 1956, Amy Gerstler writes of her childhood: “Books were momentary stays against confusion to corrupt Robert Frost’s description of poetry.” Like her, until college I believed “poetry was something practiced only in the distant past, like jousting or clavichord playing.” She was forty-four when she graduated with her M.F.A. from Bennington. I was forty.
-Morgan English