Only Here: Selected Poems

by Joe Salerno

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• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1886841071
• ISBN13: 9781886841079
• Release Date: March 1998
• Publisher: Ars Poetica Book Ars Poetica Book
• Length: 75 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Fine poet, beautiful and giving man

What to say? His poetry was lovely work, graceful and well-wrought. The man himself?--beautiful. He met me one day in a Barnes & Noble poetry aisle, recognized me (I'm hardly recognizable). I'd just been awarded a Fellowship by the NJ State Council on the Arts. "I'm glad someone good got it" he said, and shook my hand. A few months later I learned he was dying of cancer at that point in the late summer of 1995, and died around Thanksgiving. He surely knew. He gave me a gift. I can never repay it except by telling the story of his grace and generosity of spirit.

inspiration

It's a shame that poets like Joe Salerno will never receive the attention they so justly deserve. While high school textbooks are filled with Cummings, Pound, and all the "great American Poets," quality writing did not end with the forefathers of the modernist movement. The simplicity of Salerno's book and his desire for sickdays and afternoons in bed serve as an inspiration, especially in today's success-driven society. And, if for nothing else, read the book for "The Last Goat of Bergen County," I guarantee you'll love it.

Failure as a tool for happiness....

In this book, Joe Salerno leaves behind the world of achievment, the dreams of success and replaces them with the happiness one finds buried underneath. It is a lesson born out of experience, of a realization that dreams will never be completely fulfilled. Heaven becomes a place of quite lonely, solitude. It is only when we reject the ego driven fight for success that happiness really comes to us. It is an acceptance of our place in the world, of being with the world. Like he writes in his poem, "Leaves Like Old Boards", ...each year the leaves add their weight to the world, / making the earth heavier, and each year we walk / wading through tides of leaves, snuffling a few times / in the cold, watching as what's left of the sun / fills the branches of the voiceless afternoon. Here we see the need to realize our place and never fight it. We are trudging through along side the leaves, making the world heavier with each quit passing moment. Our mortality and happiness exists along side everything else. There is no higher or lower, it all adds to the world. It isn't until we let everything fall into place that we are able to find our happiness. This book is a testement to life, to the real reasons why life is sacred, written by a man who learned how to live it...

Joe Salerno focuses on the sacredness of intimacy.

The title poem, "Only Here", sets the tone of the collection, which is one of enchantment with the ordinary things of this world. In "Only Here", Salerno speaks of waking up in the morning, lying next to his wife who is pregnant with their first child. Like his wife, his poem is pregnant with awe. Salerno writes of "holding the blue piece of a dream...before the day's first word spreads meaning out over the world."Like "Only Here," most of the poems deal with intimate relationships and moments in nature. In "The Corner," Salerno describes his favorite spot in the garden, where he sits both in summer and winter, giving up all thought and "surrendering myself to the precise fragrance of the cold," while "feeling each tiny wetness [of the falling snowflakes]like a blessing."Of poetry, Salerno writes that it's "the art of not succeeding...the art of those who didn't make it after all; who were lucky enough to be left behind," in the mindless race towards achievement. Salerno is concerned with the zen of everyday life, and, in "Every-Minute-Zen," he describes the intensity of concentration involved in stalking an angry hornet.Family, friends,nature, and his fellow poets are the subject matter of Salerno's poetry. The sacredness of intimacy and intimate moments is their undersong. His poems are accessible to the ordinary reader, and will be especially appreciated by other poets.

Captured: the sweetness and sorrow of everyday living.

There can be wonder in everything as well as sorrow. In these slices of life, Joe Salerno captures the poignant moments of commonality that make living so sacred, so interesting, so worthwhile.If you want to enrich your life experience, these poems will provide counsel for things you might miss and retrospect for those you did.