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The Great Fires: Poems, 1982-1992

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I recently moved house and had to consider carefully which books to take with me for a time abroad. I'd have to pay for the weight I carried. I eventually took Gilbert as one of my only poets. I also took the short stories of Hawthorne. Both are spare metaphysicians with a sense of humor. I don't go six months without picking up this book and reading something in it. Very few poets can stand up to that kind of revisiting. Bleak humour and refusal to be falsely comforted. An eye for what you may remember at the end of your life.

Many of these are poems about women - wives and how he came to leave them, lovers and how they came to die and how he mourned, a young married mother whose baby he threw in the air and murmured PITTSBURGH to in between their trysts. Short, tender, very emotional poems from a man discinclined to easy emotion or postures. Poems to read at difficult junctures in your life and get perspective from. And, finally, poems with a great reach of ambition unusual nowadays in American verse. Poems that claim to talk to God, or at least sit with him for a while on the front porch.

Jack Gilbert's was the first book of poetry I ever bought. Countless purchases, and a decade later, it's still the book I reopen on the eventual tired or tormented nights.

A few of the poems are instant favorites. For me, many of the others grew slowly over the years, so that, some random night, when the poem finally hit me I felt as if I was holding an entirely new book in my hands.

The poetry is largely heavy. But there is a hope, a conviction, a courage, or something warming glancing out that will keep you, too, coming back to old pages. This is a purchase you will not regret.

T.S.Eliot once said that many of the most successful writers have published either a lot or very little. Gilbert has chosen the later strategy. Like Cavafy, he has been scrupulous about giving the reader only the very best and most carefully crafted writing from his desk. The result is a small but extremely distinguished body of work that should be remembered as among the best of his generation. Buy this book. Read it closely. The poems will make you strong.

I went to one of Gilbert's readings 10 years ago in college, before I had even heard of him. I was moved, but I was also younger then and perhaps a bit naive to grasp his full grace.

I've been pleasantly haunted by Gilbert's words since that reading, but this most recent recall was different. I woke up one morning with just his name in my throat, like finding a $20 bill in a coat you haven't worn in a while. I immediately ordered the book, and when it arrived, I just knew there was something in there my life had been missing.

Mostly I love that Gibert finds beauty in the tragic, and he goes beyond the details to ripen the heart of his concepts. He is linguistic evolution in action, carving new identities for familiar words so that we are humbled and enlightened when we read them. His imagery is poignant yet sublime, and I find myself inspired by the potential for beauty in everyday things. Gilbert's gift is that of profound resonance.

I read this book at the insistance of a professor, and was immediately struck dumb by the sheer power of every poem. Not a word could be added or subtracted anywhere without tarnishing the perfection. For example, one line out of "Adulterated" perfectly conveys the humanity in us all, even in our deities: "There were flowers all around Jesus in his agony at Gethsemene. The Lord sees averything and sees that it is good despite everything." In another poem, "Dante Dancing," he talks of the "absolute love possible only when we are ignorant of each other." I love Ovid, Shakespeare, Whitman, Coleridge ,and many others that stand as the giants of our collective literrary heritage, but If I had to choose one book of poetry that was utterly indispensible, this would be it.

Jack Gilbert is a poet who has had long absences from the publishing world and The Great Fires is a collection of Gilbert's poems spanning 1982-1992. While The Great Fires does deal with powerful emotion it does not fall into the category of "sentiment" that some critics have accused Gilbert of before. Instead, Jack Gilbert deals with loss and love with directness and without apology. The poems to his deceased wife, Michiko, a sculptor who died at age thirty six are some of the most arresting in this collection. These poems - including "Married" and "Alone" - convey a deep sense of loss and longing. Yet, these same poems also demonstrate Gilbert's keen sense of self-awareness and his allowance for self-recrimination. Gilbert's poems do not rely heavily on the narrative, but still invite the reader into the stories of the poet's life and the universal emotion accessible to all.

I'm a voracious reader of poetry. I eat and breathe it. So it's rare for a new volume to excite me enough to write an online review such as this. If I can try to pinpoint the genius of his work, it would lie in what he purposely DOESN'T say. It's a book full of grieving, and I find myself grieving with him largely because I'm allowed to experience itÐnot told how to experience. His style harkens back to the ModernistsÐa movement that I wish poetry as a whole would remember. His work demonstrates originality, not in gimicky form or syntax or shock value, but in thought

Poet Jack Gilbert wrote his first book of poetry in 1962, "Views of Jeopardy," which attracted considerable media and critical acclaim and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. And then - retreat and isolation, almost as if the attention was too overwhelming for the then 37-year-old (and what do you for an encore?).

In the intervening years, Gilbert continued to write and publish in various journals, and produced several other volumes of poetry, including "Monolithos" (1984), "The Great Fires" (1994), "Refusing Heaven" (2005), "Tough Heaven: Poems of Pittsburgh" (2006), "Transgressions" (UK, 2006), and "The Dance Most of All" (2009). He's now 84, and lives in Northampton, Mass.

My introduction to Glibert's poetry has been "The Great Fires," which falls approximately in the middle between his triumphant first volume and the works published in the current decade. His poems are lyrical and clean, like clear ice. They suggest a distance, a separation. The poet is sitting on the side, detached, watching and not participating. From "The White Heart of God:"

The snow falling around the man in the naked woods
is like the ash of heaven, ash from the cool fire
of God's mother-of-pearl, moon-stately heart.
sympathetic but not merciful. His strictness
parses us. The discomfort of living this way
without birds, among maples without leaves, makes
death and the world visible. Not the harshness,
but the way the world can be known by pushing
against it. And feeling something pushing back.
The whiteness of the winter married to this river
Makes the water look black. The water actually
is the color of giant mirrors set along the marble
corridors of the spirit, the mirrors empty
of everything. The man is doing the year's accounts...

And there's a reason for the detachment - the poet, and the poems are haunted. All of these poems, some directly but most indirectly, even the ones about an affair with a Danish woman named Anna, are about the death of Gilbert's wife, Michiko Nogami, in 1982. The poem in the collection that bears her name:

Michiko Nogami (1946-1982)

Is she more apparent because she is not
anymore forever? Is her whiteness more white
because she was the color of pale honey?
A smokestack making the sky more visible.
A dead woman filling the whole world. Michiko
Said, "The roses you gave me kept me awake
With the sound of their petals falling."

Haunted and haunting, indeed.

Rather than strain to convince us of his sincerity by attempting to explain "the mystery," in his poems Gilbert concentrates on the details, keeping his language simple and his voice low, trusting the "real nouns" to do the hard work. The poems in this collection push past easy surfaces, getting to the heart, seeing the suffering and madness, and saying, as he does at the end of "A Stubborn Ode," "nevertheless." The publication of The Great Fires confirms that Jack Gilbert is one of the very few absolutely essential poets writing today.

Jack Gilbert may not be a very well known poet, but he is certainly a talented one. The Great Fires is a collection of poems about the love and loss of his wife, Michiko. He cleverly weaves vivid images and unusual comparisons into his personal expressions of both infatuation and grief. His poems, ideas and terminology bring out his specific uniqueness that sets him apart from most other contemporary poets. Once you pick up this book you really don't want to put it down.