Just Saying
Selected Poems from My Sixties and Seventies
- Arts & Literature
- Publisher: Resource Publications (Wipf and Stock)
- Published: 2026
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Publisher's Description
Just Saying is an older poet’s reactions to being-in-the world. Reflecting, responding, maybe even half-philosophizing, half-admonishing. Poems about the natural world, about politics and the mess the world is in, about literature, especially Shakespeare, about the universe and our place in it, about time and temporality and getting old and facing mortality and the death of friends, about the recent pandemic. Thoughtful, playful, ironic, angry, tongue-in-cheek, sarcastic, wry. Sometimes provocative and maybe even proverbial. A poet with a lifetime’s accumulating experiences observing from the margins of our strange world. A poet who wonders and whose mind wanders and who does not mince his words. A seasoned poet who speaks from both the head and the heart about everything and about nothing. Just Saying.
Endorsements (5)
“This is a major work of poetry from a writer who has for decades been doing so much more than ‘just saying’ it. His poems’ speakers often figure themselves ‘on the outside looking in,’ but you get the sense that they know the inside of everything. The poems gracefully know aging. The light their words cast upon us falls but never fails. Such refusal of failure is part of a gentle redefinition of life.”
“Stelzig’s poems are scholarly and formally adept in equal measure. But their secret weapon is earnestness: they wear their learning lightly, always balancing the intellect with a winning generosity and human tenderness.”
“’I would like to land a poem / the way a boxer lands a blow,’ Eugene Stelzig writes in one poem in this rich and varied new collection. I’ve been reeling from any number of Gene’s poems for six decades now. The best poetry sustains us through this life, and Gene’s poetry does precisely that, never more so than in this book, where aging and thoughts of death—from the funny to the chilling—begin to dominate and linger.”
“Just Saying is the latest volume of lifelong poet and scholar, Eugene Stelzig. Although it covers some of the same ground as his earlier poetry, his approach is fresh and eminently accessible to the casual reader. With wide ranging topics like nature, philosophy, politics, literature, and aging, there is something for everyone to enjoy and relate to.”
“In meticulously crafted and compassionately humane poems of beguiling intellectual ease and elegance, Eugene Stelzig reminds us that no matter the misery and mayhem we humans inflict on one another and the planet, an infinitely various natural world remains to astonish, comfort and console us. His voice—witty, wise, and seasoned with a lifetime’s experience—celebrates with startling clarity the magic of the ordinary amid the doubts and questions that modernity incessantly forces upon us.”
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