Poetry | Soft cover | 106 pages | $18
Plain Sight is an exquisite book of poems by David Bergman, “a post-modern master of the lyric narrative poem,” according to Daniel Mark Epstein. Now in his 70s, and having lived with Parkinson’s for eight years, Bergman offers up poems about love, chronic illness, friendship and aging parents that constantly surprise us in their twists and turns, their verbal brilliance, and their wit. Ultimately, Plain Sight is a deep celebration of life in all of its pain and grace.
Praise for Plain Sight
With hue these poems are laden and a wry wit, wistful as it is fragrant. With panache and a charm that’s wise enough to avert wisdom. With rueful loves and bluesy affirmations, through illness and loss: the consummate pleasure in words’ disarming hurt. In Plain Sight is the vigilant, aging poet, whose humor wipes away tears.
Charles Bernstein, winner of the Bollingen Prize
It seems incomprehensible that we have had to wait twenty-five years for another full-length collection
from David Bergman. Plain Sight is a priceless, heart-catching Trojan Hoard of poetic invention. Mordant, elegiac, often hilarious, Bergman’s voice combines the seemingly effortless plainsong of Whitman, Auden, and Marianne Boruch with the hard-won knowledge that Time erodes — and surprises — us all. To paraphrase the poet, these poems are acts of grace able to lift and move the world.
James Magruder, Vamp Until Ready
David Bergman is a post-modern master of the lyric narrative poem. An engaging storyteller whose narratives pulse with pathos, he navigates the crises of our lives with a gentle irony that avoids sentimentality. The range of his themes — love, death, progressive illness, art, and the conflict between sons and mothers — is supported by a striking command of metaphor and emotional tone.
Daniel Mark Epstein, Dawn to Twilight: New and Selected Poems
With these extraordinary poems, David Bergman makes himself more visible and discoverable, in spite of the difficulty, as his title poem proclaims, of the ordinary being seen at all.
I am stunned by the richness of his language — and envious. Plain Sight? His originality makes it complex and anything but plain, with a poet’s bursts of metaphor and constant turning in surprising new directions.
Edward Field, After the Fall
2023 Pushcart Prize nominations
“The Man Who Fell Off the Curb,” “The Man Who Could Not Smile”
About the Author
David Bergman is the author of three books of poetry, Cracking the Code, which won the George Elliston Poetry Prize, Heroic Measures and The Fortunate Light. He is the author of the studies The Poetry of Disturbance: The Discomforts of Post-War American Poetry as well as Gaiety Transfigured: Gay Self-Representation in American Poetry. His poetry won the 2022 Passager Poetry Contest and has appeared in such journals as The American Scholar, The Missouri Review, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, The New Republic, and The Yale Review.
Bergman in the Media
JMore “Poet David Bergman Explores the Aging Process and Life’s Challenges”
Reseller Ordering Information
Download a copy of the book’s press kit:
Plain Sight by David Bergman
Paperback: 106 pages
Publisher: Passager Books
ISBN 978-1-7355148-7-1
Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.315 x 9 inches
$18
Bookstores: order through Itasca Books
Questions: editors@passagerbooks.com