A Gallery of Ghosts

 

Paperback, 6"x9", 250 pages

ISBN:0-9728143-3-7

March 2008

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... 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