Customer Reviews

Refusing Heaven

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Gilbert is not a workshop poet, let alone politically correct in any way. He writes to live and not to get tenure. He's overlooked these days; he's old, out of step, and has never published often. Maybe that's the fate of masters who have written poems that can save your life, like this one:

Failing and Flying

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It's the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.

I've read some women critics who are first bothered by his focus on women, as if he used them as stepping stones to God. Most don't. Gilbert's a little like Robert Graves, who found women in all their humanity the heart of a heartless world. He's a poet of sharp-eyed praise. Read him: he may be the last great poet.

I am an avid reader of poetry: classical and modern, in English, in translation, in other languages, in collections and magazines, in any form I can find it. Without a doubt, this is one of the finest books of poetry I've ever read, maybe the finest. Each poem is lyrical and elegant - complete in its own right - but the collection also works as a whole. The poems are spare, and for the most part, sad, speaking to love and loss, life, letting go, and holding on. They are classical subjects of poetry, and they manage here, to be both intimate - a seemingly autobiographical look into the author's emotional life - and universal. And somehow, too, they manage to be timeless and vast in their appeal: accessible, I think, to a casual reader of poetry, and yet equally rich for a student of the traditional forms. I devoured this book, reading it in a single sitting lasting late into the night. And then the next day, when I awoke, I read it again. That was a month ago, but the images linger: life altering and life affirming, the essence of great poetry.

Jack Gilbert's "The Abnormal Is Not Courage" has been on my wall for some 25 years -- words to live by. It has been joined by "A Brief for the Defense." Gilbert is a poet who is not afraid of ideas, of hard truths, of inherent conflict. His poems aren't about how to live, but why.

A book review in the LA Times encouraged me to buy this slim but rich book. Poetry, I think, attempts to express the unexpressible and the best poets do that in language accessible to all. Gilbert does that with sublime beauty. There's a great deal of wisdom here as well: "We're all burning in time, but each is consumed at his own speed. Each is the product of his spirt's refraction, of the inflection of that mind. It is the pace of our living that makes the world available." (Burning, p. 19) Even though I never experienced what he has in life, he gave me the insight and inspiration to look at my own with better eyes.

Jack Gilbert is an excellent poet. Like all books of poetry, this volume has many wonderful poems and a few clunkers. Sometimes his poem endings are a wonderful surprise or a shock which is the mark of a excellent craftsman which he certainly is. That said,a few poems in the volume shoot themselves in the foot with contrived endings. Definitely recommended.

Jack Gilbert is an uneven poet, wonderful at his imagistic best, talky and preachy at his abstract worst. The chief flaw of this 92-page volume is that it contains far too many poems. Without the clutter of the so-so pieces, this could be a lean and elegant book, more in keeping with the poet's ability to "flower by tightening." He deserves better editing; after all, he is an important voice in American poetry, an extremely ambitious poet who tries to marry wisdom with beauty. Who else would dare conclude a poem with this statement -
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as the rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.

Gilbert's unique strength is use of the imagination, his ability to interweave the mental realm with realistic details. "Bring in the Gods" and "The End of Paradise" are among the Top Five here, as is "What Song Should We Sing." Another interesting poem is "Trouble," with its startling ending that blurs the boundary between reality and imagination. "The Lost Hotels of Paris," "A Thanksgiving Dance," and "Burma" are also among my favorites, along with "Seen from Above" and "The Garden," which begins,

We come from a deep forest of years
into a valley of an unknown country
called loneliness. Without horse or dog,
the heavens bottomless overhead.
We are like Marco Polo who came back
with jewels hidden in the seams of his ragged clothes.

The opening of "Moreover" is simply extraordinary:

We are given the trees so we can know
what God looks like. And rivers
so we might understand Him. We are allowed
women so we can get into bed with the Lord,
however partial and momentary that is.
The passion, and then we are single again
while the dark goes on.

Often, however, I like only parts of certain poems, and I wonder if we could have "fragments of Jack Gilbert" the way we have fragments of Sappho - for some poems, it would be a huge improvement. On page 30, for instance, embedded in an otherwise almost unbearable poem, with the unbearable title "'Tis Here! `Tis Here! `Tis Gone! (The Nature of Presence)," we find this gem:

The silence of the mountain is not our silence.
The sound of the earth will never be Un Bel Di.
We are a contingent occurrence. The white horse
In moonlight is more white than when it stands
in sunlight. And even then it depends on whether
a bell is ringing.

This would likely be its own poem in Gilbert's earlier, tighter Monolithos. Likewise, this passage from "Horses at Midnight without a Moon" (p.63) could be a poem by itself.

We know the horses are there in the dark
meadow because we can smell them,
can hear them breathing.
Our spirit persists like a man struggling
through the frozen valley
who suddenly smells flowers
and realizes the snow is melting
out of sight on top of the mountain,
knows that spring has begun.

*

The volume's central message, implied already in the title, is that this life is the real paradise. Even a minor poem can suddenly blossom with this message. After wading through the fog of the abstract beginning of "Prospero Listening to the Night" (fortunately Gilbert drops the Prospero persona in this volume - this is the only exception), we get to this:

What he is listening to is
the muteness of the dogs at each farm
in the valley. Their silence means no
lover is abroad nor any vagrant looking
for where to sleep. But there is a young
man, very still, under the heavy grapes
in another part of Heaven. There are still
women hoping behind the dark windows
of farmhouses.

**

Some readers might object that what we have here is the limited poetry of an isolated individual, someone who protests too much about the virtues of poverty and solitude. Gilbert is not going to convince anyone that finding yourself old and alone crowns the "good life." Contrary to Dickey's blurb on the back cover, I don't think that Gilbert teaches us how to live and die. To most people, human connection is more important by far than the sound of the oars in the dark.

While Gilbert's narcissism can become tiresome, the genuine beauty of his lyrical lines, when he does achieve that beauty, makes it worth the occasional annoyance with statements like "What interested him / most was who he was about to become" - because before it we could feast on

. . . Mortality like
a cello inside him. Like rain in the dark.

There are enough excellent poems and fine passages here that I'd recommend this book, especially to those readers who can forgive some abstraction and sententiousness. The beauties make it worth it. Just when you give up on a particular poem, you can come across this:

Reality is not what we marry as a feeling. It is what
walks up the dirt path, through the excessive heat
and giant sky, the sea stretching away.

I already own a physical copy of this book. I wanted a digital edition for my Kindle and I bought one. What garbage, the formatting on the Kindle is done with such thoughtlessness and disregard that it should never have been released at all. I don't want to rate this 2 stars, the poetry deserves 5. Of course on Kindle you can't return anything you buy either, despite DRM preventing any illegal copying. Buy the physical book, but stay away from the Kindle edition.

After the first reading of Jack Gilbert's newest collection, I put it up upon my shelf, grabbed another beer, and said, "That wasn't bad." I had no expectations going in, as I remain unfamiliar with the poet's other work. However, the 87 poems in this book allowed me a sense that I knew the man in his many aspects. The poetry at first seems simple, allowing for easy reading. Perhaps this is a function of the fact that Gilbert does not try to play around too much with the form. Most of poetry is unassuming, with no pretensions of saying anything new in the way of form, or in trying to create something new with the use of rhyme. These poems are short, introspective scenes of place and the mind that are largely personal, but have a way of conveying something more general so that I felt enlightened about both Gilbert's life, and my own.

The sharply refined nature of these poems could be because he has had ample time to work on his songs. Eschewing the contemporary poetic career arc of finding a comfortable place in academia and publishing a book ever few years, Gilbert looked backwards for inspiration. His life's journey has taken him on the in search of vitality and love, much in the vein of some of poets he admires. In the text of the poems, he mentions Wordsworth, Keats, Ginsburg, and Pound. Many of his poems reflect this self-imposed exile in search of the truth his forbearers were looking for. In a short lyric entitled "Truth," he reflects on these perceptions versus reality: "The glare of the Greek sun / on our stone house / is not so white / as the pale moonlight on it." (23). In this poem, we find one of the many themes Gilbert presents the reader: paradise, as figured in Grecian villas and the shared bliss of togetherness, take on a more sinister, deathlike quality in the moonlight.

Gilbert is able to do this because he is a highly reflective poet. In these verses, he is taking stock of a life lived, and is able to imbue it with an intense, almost perverse beauty. He was married to the sculptor Michiko Nogami for eleven years. She died of cancer when she was a youthful thirty-six, but this loss is persuasive in Gilbert's poems in Refusing Heaven. Many of these poems are outright eulogies of his wife, who one would suspect he considers the most important love of his life. Nogami's presence is felt throughout the book, from the dedication page to "Maybe She is Here," the final poem of the book. This presence, however, seems cloying and over done. Few of these poems stand out as poems that make the reader stop and contemplate with awe. After finally picking the book back up again to look at it more critically, I found myself once again stopping at the poem "Maybe Very Happy":

After she died he was seized
by a great curiosity about what
it was like for her. Not that he
doubted how much she loved him.
But he knew there must have been
some things she had not liked.
So he went to her closest friend
and asked what she complained of.
"It's all right," he had to keep
saying, "I really won't mind."
Until the friend finally gave in.
"She said sometimes you made a noise
drinking your tea if it was very hot." (82)

In this poem, I find the distillation of what seems to be Gilbert's project with the elegies. This is on of the few times he pulls away from the first person in his poems and allows a more universal third person voice. As readers, we are familiar by this time with the themes of loss in the book, but this poem allows a relationship with the poet's world for the reader. No longer is the poem solely about the relationship between Gilbert and Nogami, but now the poem is about all relationships and the everything, mundane things that we tend to focus on. By setting up the character's anxiety with the friend's unwillingness to speak, the reader is lead to expect some grand pronouncement about the nature of this personal love, but it is nothing more than a personal idiosyncrasy. While in some of the poems about Nogami, this poem distances itself from becoming too much reliant on the strictly sentimental, but allows it too, making it one of the best poems in the collection.

Even of these poems are elegiac and reflective, there is still a sense of hopefulness allowed in the poems. Even with closing poem, "Maybe She is Here," Gilbert does not allow his loss to overburden his mind with too dire predictions. While he has spilt much ink on his love, we really have little sense of what Nogami is like, but we see her through Gilbert's eyes. The poem begins: "She might be here secretly. / On her hands and knees / with her head down a bit / tilted to peer around the doorjamb / in the morning, watching me / before I wake up." (92). Here, even at the ordinal end of his project of Refusing Heaven, Gilbert has found something greater than a paradise in the sky. The act of writing these poems and remembering her in song has the ability to resurrect his love from the world of the past, and instead place it in the heaven that can be found on earth.

As noted earlier, Gilbert choose the path less traveled for the contemporary poet. While refusing to take a more comfortable academic job for the majority of his life, his output has been limited. After wining the Yale Younger Poets prize in 1962 for his first book, Views of Jeopardy, he released Monoliths. While both books were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize, he has remained largely silent, releasing Kochan (1984), a small book of seven elegies in a limited edition; The Great Fires: Poems 1982-1992 (1996); and now Refusing Heaven. The several prize nominations Gilbert's work has garnered is no surprise to one who has read his poems. Not only is a focus on defining and refining his style evident from many of the poems, this idea seeps into becoming fully realized poems in itself. Gilbert confronts the awesome task of actively being a poet in the face of all the artists who came before him. Several of the poems here could be collected into an ars poetica for Gilbert, the most striking example of intent being "Less Being More":

It started when he was a young man,
and went to Italy. He climbed mountains,
wanting to be a poet. But was troubled
by what Dorothy Wordsworth wrote in
her journal about William having worn
himself out searching all day to find
a simile for a nightingale. It seemed
a long way from the tug of passion.
He ended up staying in pensioni
where the old women would take up
the children in the middle of the night
to rent the room, carrying them warm
and clinging to the mothers, the babies
making a mewing sound. He began hunting
for the second rate. The insignificant
ruins, the negligible museums, the back-
country villages with only one pizzeria
and two small bars. The unimproved. (39)

This poem allows the reader a look into the intentions of the poet, as he compares the poet's search for beauty and meaning with one of the poets that influence his work, William Wordsworth, with the lyric qualities and both of the poets search for the sublime in life. However Gilbert chooses to acknowledge his debt, he also acknowledges that there is a difference in the way the two poets write. While Wordsworth is depicted looking for le mot juste, that seems to be in opposition from the way Gilbert writes from the less cranial and more visceral part of the anatomy. Gilbert accepts that he may never live up to the expectations he set himself as a young man, and is happy with the charming quality of the second-rate. The simple surface of his poetry here in Refusing Heaven reflects the very emotional quality in which we can experience his art.

One could charge that these poems are of little value because of this seemingly surface nature of the poems, but I would not agree. While this particular book may not have any poems destined towards future Norton Anthologies, I would recommend this book. Sometimes we must eschew playfulness and listen to those who have experienced lives and have the advice of age. Gilbert, at the age of seventy-nine and having lived in that time more than many of us can hope, is a sage we can look for both to know ourselves, and the art we create.