Derek Walcott has written, "It is the fate of poetry to fall in love with the world, in spite of history." In The End of Michelangelo, Dan Gerber's poems remind us that the very fact of being alive - of experiencing our fleeting, fragile, existence - is our only source of joy, our only avenue of consolation and compassion. These poems of late-life experience wake us up, revivify our existence, and nurture our desire to go on living, despite our times, to counter our times, to open ourselves to both beauty and terror, and to Rilke's reminder that, "No feeling is final."