UNO Press - University of New Orleans Publishing

A Gallery of Ghosts

Paperback, 6"x9", 250 pages

ISBN:0-9728143-3-7

March 2008

... A perfectly balanced off-balance stance is virtually this poet’s aesthetic, which prizes a harmony built out of conflicting, unresolved, though temporarily poised, forces. Surgically sharp language is his instrument of choice for probing wounds, fissures, under surfaces. John Donne is surely an ancestor, given Gery’s intellectuality and passion, his own metaphysical conceits, his love for expertly weaving lively speech through intricate forms. Finally, though, what arrests attention here is the provisional quality of Gery’s poems—not that they are unfinished, indeed he writes with high polish—but that they arrive with the breath of a life about them, an intensely personal quality marked by such generous vulnerability and openness to the future that his work can burn the reader used to a literature not so determined to play for keeps.
—Philip Dacey

John Gery is a master of structure and form, surely one of the most challenging poets of his generation. His subjects range from close self-analysis to abstract considerations of time and place, but essentially he is interested in adapting traditional poetics to fit contemporary situations. The risks he takes are considerable, and they often come up with surprises. To write one rhymed poem, ten syllables per line in regular stanzas of six lines each, is difficult enough. To fill the greater part of a book with such poems is remarkable almost beyond belief.
—Anne Stevenson

Metaphysical wit, emotional complexity, and surreal comedy infuse these crackling reports from a world not unlike our own, but seen with a wonderful freshness and a complete absence of cant that makes it very much John Gery’s. A Gallery of Ghosts is a collection not to be missed.
—Charles Martin

Born in 1953, John Gery grew up in Lititz, Pennsylvania, and studied at Princeton, the University of Chicago, and Stanford. His previous books of poetry include Charlemagne: A Song of Gestures (Plumbers Ink, 1983), The Burning of New Orleans (Amelie, 1988), Three Poems (Le Stat, 1989), The Enemies of Leisure (Story Line, 1995), winner of a Critic’s Choice Award and a “Best Book of 1995” citation from Publishers Weekly, and Davenport’s Version (Portals, 2003), a narrative poem of Civil War New Orleans. His American Ghost: Selected Poems (Raska Skola, 1999; Cross Cultural, 1999), translated by Biljana D. Obradovic, an English-Serbian collection published in Belgrade, received the European Award of the Circle Franz Kafka in Prague. He has also published a critical book, Nuclear Annihilation and Contemporary American Poetry: Ways of Nothingness (Florida, 1996) and, with Vahe Baladouni, For the House of Torkom (Cross Cultural, 1999), an English translation of prose poems by the Armenian poet Hmayyag Shems. His awards include an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, a Louisiana Artist Fellowship, and two Deep South Writers Poetry Prizes. A Research Professor of English at the University of New Orleans, he has also taught at Stanford, San Jose State, and the University of Iowa, and he is Founding Director of the Ezra Pound Center for Literature at Brunnenburg Castle, Italy.


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