Plain Sight by David Bergman

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”