Bert Meyers: On the Life and Work of an American Master

Warm-hearted recollections of Bert Meyers as a father, maverick autodidact, and professor at Pitzer College are interleaved with 65 of his poems in this Unsung Masters volume, edited by Dana Levin and Adele Elise Williams, bringing back into print the work of the southern California poet nearly a century after his birth.

The format makes this a deeply personal book, evoking the curly-headed author’s ready smile and generous presence. “Reading Bert Meyers cleanses the senses,” Amy Gerstler remarks, while José Angel Araguz observes: “reading Meyers I feel as though I am being asked to take myself seriously as a human being.”

A moving divergence may be sensed between Meyers’s public persona and the introspective quality of his poems. “I feel like a streetlight / tall and radiant / my face was made / to shine among the others,” one poem ends; it begins: “Nobody’s honest / nothing matters.” Enfolded into this beautiful evocation of self-as-streetlight is a strong sense of singularity that might also be a form of loneliness.

By devoutly attending to the world, Meyers discovers in (often natural) material objects a solace he might not find in others:

In a little room
behind my forehead,
people are talking about me.
They’re at a table
and they have yellow voices.

I’m a bell
they’ve buried in the snow.

Sometimes I feel
so vast, the stars
come out upon my skin.

This isolation sits comfortably alongside tender poems dedicated to the poet’s wife, such as “Ocean”:

When calm, the sea’s so blue
you could paint the sky with it.
Sometimes, it’s a green tablecloth
laid on the wind.

Fog—
sailing for hours
in the same spot;

and the joyful sound
of the invisible sea.

The translucent clarity of Meyers’s metaphors astound: “At night, each window’s a glass of wine / the darkness drinks as it passes.” His similes are no less distinctive: “Pale girls lean on their windowsills, / framed like the earliest photographs.”

Daniel Meyers, the poet’s son, has curated an excellent multimedia archive of his father’s work, and this book is a joyful distillation of a significant twentieth-century American poet’s neglected oeuvre.