This volume of the Unsung Masters Series was written with poetry aficionados in mind — especially those who have never heard of Bert Meyers. With a unique voice that is at once lyrical and spare, Meyers imbues every word and breath with meaning. His poetry is a balancing act between irreverence and reverence: he resists the norms of life and language to create verse that often sounds like prayer.
In one memorable poem, Meyers uses garlic as a metaphor for a rabbi. “Rabbi of condiments/whose breath is a verb,/wearing a thin beard/and a white robe … ” In true Jewish form, what starts as a humorous and lighthearted poem ends on a tragic note. Although Meyers, the son of Romanian Jewish immigrants, wasn’t a religious man, he had strong ties to Jewish history and culture. At the end of the poem, he explores some of these ties, and concludes with a reference to the Holocaust:
Now, my parents pray,
my grandfather sits,
my uncles fill
my mouth with ashes.
In “Public Places,” Meyers writes about spaces, like cafes, where “you can be alone not lonely.” His simple rhymes at the end of the poem reveal the complexity of his feelings as he approaches the end of his life, when he will, ultimately, die of lung cancer.
Meyers’s poetry covers a range of themes. His language is minimal, humble, drawing attention to the speaker’s experiences and emotions. In “At Night,” Meyers writes about death — but it’s really time, not death, that’s the enemy. In his signature imagistic style, he turns the heart into a metaphor for the finitude of life:
But death comes:
out of the faucets, the floors,
from the big clock that bleeds
weakening in its springs,
it comes shoveling out my chest.
And I don’t know why
but I know the heart beats
and beats a man to death.
Meyers died a young man, at the age of fifty-two, but he left behind a body of work that’s timeless. His words will continue to resonate with current readers, as well as with those who have yet to discover this unsung master.
Stewart Florsheim’s poetry has been widely published in magazines and anthologies. He was the editor of Ghosts of the Holocaust, an anthology of poetry by children of Holocaust survivors (Wayne State University Press, 1989). He wrote the poetry chapbook, The Girl Eating Oysters (2River, 2004). In 2005, Stewart won the Blue Light Book Award for The Short Fall From Grace (Blue Light Press, 2006). His collection, A Split Second of Light, was published by Blue Light Press in 2011 and received an Honorable Mention in the San Francisco Book Festival, honoring the best books published in the Spring of 2011. Stewart’s new collection, Amusing the Angels, won the Blue Light Book Award in 2022.
