Bert Meyers — Early Rain and Other Poems

Bert Meyers made poems with the hands of a craftsman and the nerves of someone who knew how quickly a life can fracture. A high-school dropout who became a master picture framer, graduate student, and unforgettable Pitzer College teacher, he wrote brief, exact poems in which tools, alleys, animals, family gestures, and Los Angeles light suddenly open onto class, illness, Jewish memory, love, and death. Early Rain and Other Poems returns to his original books and little-magazine appearances rather than reprinting the later collected edition. The result restores the sequence in which readers first encountered him: the sharpened social and erotic poems of California Quarterly and Coastlines, the hard clarity of Early Rain, the mature compression of Sunlight on the Wall, and the luminous late sequences of 1979.