A Review of One River by Ricardo Sternberg

By Carla Sarett

Ricardo Sternberg, One River: New and Selected Poems. Véhicule Press, 2024.

Review by Carla Sarett

In trying to understand the peculiar charms of the poet Ricardo Sternberg, we might as well start with his full (and frankly wonderful) name—Ricardo da Silveira Lobo O’Reilly Sternberg. So there it is: a mixture of Portuguese, Irish, and German backgrounds, all filtered through an immigrant’s lens. This is a writer who has made the journey from Brazil to Canada, without losing his roots or, more importantly, himself. As he puts the matter, in the poem “One River,”—“This new me is so much like the old me / there’s a chance you didn’t even notice.”

A scholar of Brazilian and Portuguese literature at University of Toronto, Ricardo Sternberg wears his erudition lightly. In this new collection (which combines works from earlier volumes The Invention of Honey, Map of Dreams, Bamboo Church, and Some Dance with a sprinkling of new poems), he offers the confidence of a man who’s read it all, and figured out what he wants to do with it. He doesn’t have to show off, and he assumes a readership that knows as much as he does. He riffs on the classics with humor and his own bittersweet point of view.

In discussions of Sternberg’s work, the word “charm” often appears. It’s a term rarely applied to contemporary poetry, which, for better or worse, has taken a turn for the intense and edgy. Sternberg is after subtler effects — irony, tolerance, playfulness, and just a hint of magic. This is a poet who can write about dreams without veering off into surrealism: “In the middle of a dream / there is a forest / in the middle of the forest / there is a clearing.” Even mermaids pop up in a poem without too much fuss—just one of those “journeys we must undertake / on the way back to ourselves.” 

Take these lines from “A Prince’s Soliloquy,” which cleverly reverses the “handsome prince from lowly frog” fairy tale.  In Sternberg’s whimsical version, the self-pitying prince laments his transformation from pond creature to wealthy human. This poem also shows the way Sternberg’s lines seem improvised on the spot—“into the frog I was / and happy being.”

          Truth be told, 
          I wish she would 
          unkiss me,

          turn me back
          into the frog I was 
          and happy being.

          Give me back nights
          I dared the moon, 
          fat and round,

Poems like this, by turns wry, playful, stoical, magical, are entertaining in the best sense.  And yet, there is depth here: what lover hasn’t lamented the old solitary pond, the older messier self untamed by intimacy?

My personal favorites from this collection are in the poems from Map of Dreams, which are apparently drawn (in part) from the poet’s study of the journals and letters of European explorers. Here, Sternberg is able to show his narrative dazzle in a sequence of untitled linked poems. In a 2014 interview, he writes that he thinks of the explorers as “a little crazy taking to the ocean, sailing into the unknown, in search of what? El Dorado, the Kingdom of Prester John, the fountain of youth? On the other hand, …no-nonsense men who could convince tightfisted kings and bankers to finance their enterprise. This has always struck me as analogous to what poets do: fantasy then hard work.”  The sequence (as presented in this collection) begins with a vivid image—the “rum-drunk” captain “blessed and strapped to the mast.” 

          No sooner had we left 
          the coastal waters,

          the familiar latitudes, 
          than we were lost.

          Rum-drunk, the captain 
          had himself blessed

          and strapped to the mast
          Sail by the power of dreams

It’s as if all the classic narratives (the Odyssey, Moby-Dick, fairy tales) were condensed into a few lines of poetry, without losing any of their punch. In a sense, it’s a meta-poem, a poem about the actual power of stories. Sternberg is not merely telling us stories. He is grappling with the idea of narrative, with how stories get told and re-told and continually acquire new meaning. Not for him, the limits of memoir; this poet can create a vivid character with the skill of a fiction writer. The “I” in his poems is a fast-moving target, and eludes any easy categories.

Sternberg plays with this, delightfully, in the book’s opening poem “The True Story of My Life,” in which the poet is, respectively, promised in marriage to a princess at the grand age of three, then apprenticed to seven masters, one of whom is a “one-eyed gypsy” who “magically” removes a sister’s “unseemly wart / that blemished my sister’s / happiness, my father’s / designs on another kingdom.” The “true story” concludes with the narrator resisting the “sneering beauty” of the princess, giving up his father’s fortune and eloping “with the middle daughter / of the pastry cook.” Beneath the obvious laughs, there’s a message: fairy tales are fairy tales, and not every princess (or fortune) is worth the price of freedom. We feel the poet’s relief in the escape.

In other poems,  Ricardo Sternberg proves himself to be a knock-your-socks-off fabulous writer of love poetry—and I, for one, would welcome an entire book of his love poems. Without a smidgeon of sentimentality, he delivers what good love poetry needs—immediacy of feeling, and passion without vulgarity. When this guy’s in love, he is not shy about it, as in this terrific “crooked sonnet” where love “like Lazarus” returns to the poet at forty, and throws him “breathless on the beach / spitting sand and words.”  The “crooked” sonnet feels, like so much of Sternberg, completely natural, almost like breathing, as it moves toward the truth of “an unlearning is what love is.”   (All I can say after reading this is: more please.)

         Just when I thought 
         it was dead or dying 
         love, like Lazarus, 
         came back: summer,

         the year I turned forty.
         Once again it caught me, 
         rolled me under its wave, 
         threw me breathless on the beach,

         spitting sand and words.
         What does the heart ever learn 
          that it did not know at fifteen?

          Incongruous discipline, 
          a sweet short circuit,
          an unlearning is what love is.

In the new poems section of the book, Sternberg demonstrates his facility with playful (and natural) rhyming. Borrowing an ironic title from Verdi’s Rigoletto, in “La Donna è Mobile,”  Sternberg offers a casual  “bad” love affair poem. He is not afraid to rhyme “pros” with “prose,”  which adds to the poem’s effortless music. As the poet weighs “her pinch of poetry to his prose,” he wryly prays for “our daily dread.” No operatic melodrama; this couple will part, in a cool unromantic way. We like the poet for lacking his lover’s “nimble heart”—if he is too rational and prosaic, at least he is not flighty.  

          He carefully weighed the cons and pros: 
          her pinch of poetry to his prose.
          He never knew who would arrive, 
          so steeled himself to improvise 
          and play her appropriate counterpart 
          but lacked, it seemed, her nimble heart.
          Give us, he prayed, our daily dread:
          He called her Silver; she called him Lead.

All of which brings us back to what makes this poet “charming.” Charm’s an elusive quality, and few artists achieve it. In Ricardo Sternberg’s case, it boils down to what I think of as sensibility. So I will pick one word. In speaking to an ex-lover (in “Blue Letters”) the poet writes “Halfheartedly, I wish you well / knowing you wish me in hell,”  That adverb—“halfheartedly”—seems pure bittersweet Sternberg; it’s got a kind of Cole Porteresque insouciance. It makes the line swing. Of course, the man misses his ex-lover: “Still, you’re less of an issue / these days I hardly miss you.” We can picture him smoking at the bar after midnight. There’s another tale after this one, we know; and like all of Ricardo Sternberg’s poems in One River, we want to hear more.

Carla Sarett writes poetry, fiction and, occasionally, essays; and has been nominated for the Pushcart, Best American Essays, Best Microfictions, and Best of the Net. She has published one full-length collection, She Has Visions (Main Street Rag, 2022) and two chapbooks, including My Family Was Like a Russian Novel (Plan B, 2023). Carla has a PhD from University of Pennsylvania and is based in San Francisco.