Celia Gilbert's An Ark of Sorts chronicles a mother's days of grief following the death of a child. The poems fathom her inner dialogue as she tries both to comfort her family and to escape from the reality of tragedy: "I go round the grindstone reducing grain/ to something that could be bread." In the end, Gilbert shows us how the spirit turns back from despair to the light and how each of us struggles to accomplish "...the human work/ of being greater than ourselves."
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"Profound, moving poems of the hard coming-to-terms with death this map of grief in the spare language of true poetry is an illumination of all sorrow." -- Ruth Stone
"These poems are transformed into literal necessities by the hand of a poet who writes from a time in her life when there was nothing but necessity. The poems themselves become indistinguishable from bread, wine, stone, and staircase, and in this sense they are objects of force contemplative issue absolutely good." -- Fanny Howe
"These poems, eloquent, quiet, painfully clear, rise from a profound willingness to face the irremediable. This is a beautiful book this ark built to carry survivors through the flood waters of grief and loss this ark of covenants between the living and the dead." -- Richard McCann
Celia Gilbert's An Ark of Sorts is a powerful, beautifully written book with a compelling subject. In this delicately shaped series of poems, a mother recalls the passage of a year after the death of a child. An apartment in Paris is the first place of exile, then a place of refuge as the poet, with her family, mourns. Each detail in these vivid poems takes us farther and more poignantly into the city the poems describe, and into the place in the heart where the poet lives. Celia Gilbert writes in "The Secret," "'The art,' says Mademoiselle, 'lies in the way you get from one note to the other.'" An Ark of Sorts evinces that art throughout its sequence of clear images and carefully delineated feelings. -- Alice Mattison & Joyce Peseroff, Judges, The Jane Kenyon Chapbook Award Series, 1997
Recently I read "An Ark of Sorts," by Celia Gilbert, published by Alice James Books. Gilbert, a Cambridge printmaker and poet, writes about the death of her child. The poems won the first Jane Kenyon Chapbook Award. The late Jane Kenyon left us poems with which she armed herself as she confronted depression and cancer, and this book follows in her tradition of touch, clear-eyed poems that make dragons retreat. Celia Gilbert's poems touched Minnie Mae and me in a way that both sears our own memories and yet offers us comfort and companionship. I have ordered five copies to give to friends who need Celia Gilbert's lean and powerful lines as much as we have. Now I arm myself each morning with one of her poems that is framed on my writing desk.
"These poems are transformed into literal necessities by the hand of a poet who writes from a time in her life when there was nothing but necessity. The poems themselves become indistinguishable from bread, wine, stone, and staircase, and in this sense they are objects of force contemplative issue absolutely good." -- Fanny Howe
"These poems, eloquent, quiet, painfully clear, rise from a profound willingness to face the irremediable. This is a beautiful book this ark built to carry survivors through the flood waters of grief and loss this ark of covenants between the living and the dead." -- Richard McCann
Celia Gilbert's An Ark of Sorts is a powerful, beautifully written book with a compelling subject. In this delicately shaped series of poems, a mother recalls the passage of a year after the death of a child. An apartment in Paris is the first place of exile, then a place of refuge as the poet, with her family, mourns. Each detail in these vivid poems takes us farther and more poignantly into the city the poems describe, and into the place in the heart where the poet lives. Celia Gilbert writes in "The Secret," "'The art,' says Mademoiselle, 'lies in the way you get from one note to the other.'" An Ark of Sorts evinces that art throughout its sequence of clear images and carefully delineated feelings. -- Alice Mattison & Joyce Peseroff, Judges, The Jane Kenyon Chapbook Award Series, 1997
Recently I read "An Ark of Sorts," by Celia Gilbert, published by Alice James Books. Gilbert, a Cambridge printmaker and poet, writes about the death of her child. The poems won the first Jane Kenyon Chapbook Award. The late Jane Kenyon left us poems with which she armed herself as she confronted depression and cancer, and this book follows in her tradition of touch, clear-eyed poems that make dragons retreat. Celia Gilbert's poems touched Minnie Mae and me in a way that both sears our own memories and yet offers us comfort and companionship. I have ordered five copies to give to friends who need Celia Gilbert's lean and powerful lines as much as we have. Now I arm myself each morning with one of her poems that is framed on my writing desk.
Holding On
Because the dead have no memory
we must always be remembering for them.
You learn now to live under water.
Even if you grow pale with longing
for sunlight and sunsets of violet,
you must float with the currents and be of them
and it is comforting here without the treacherous,
shifting temperatures of the earth world.
Some would call it dark
but I say no: here shines
all the light I need. Here everything exists,
though it cannot grow. -- Donald M. Murray, The Boston Globe, May 12, 1998
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A year in France after the death of a daughter.,
This review is from: An Ark of Sorts (Jane Kenyon Chapbook Award Series) (Paperback)
This small book of touching and accessable poetry is about the death of a daughter and coming to terms with this horrendous loss. Those of us who have suffered that pain may find a certain rare comfort in the lines. Ah yes, I know that feeling. Yes, I felt that way, too. A wonderful closeness toward the author occured. I want to thank her for giving us this gift .
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Language Lovers Will Appreciate Her Artistry,
This review is from: An Ark of Sorts (Jane Kenyon Chapbook Award Series) (Paperback)
"This is terrible. We mustn't think about it anymore," an anguished boy tells his mother, who is overcome by fresh grief over his beloved young sister's death. With a poet's voice, Celia Gilbert allows the mother to speak, healing permeating her words.
Exiled by grief and temporary removal with her family to Paris, the mother examines and then slowly returns from the brink of loss. She cannot but enter the unmapped journey. Too much remains: two children still to love and nurture, a beloved husband, her own unfolding life. This chapbook, the winner of the first Jane Kenyon Chapbook Award, recounts Gilbert's movement through the year following the death of her daughter--the children have school and piano lessons, the table must be set. Gradually, gradually, hope and acceptance emerge. The balcony of their temporary dwelling becomes "an ark of sorts" that "bear me between earth and air." The poems carry her between loss and acceptance. Gilbert's words capture the concreteness of the city and the ongoing routines of daily life as clearly as they translate the aching of her mourning spirit and her refusal to completely relinquish the lost love. Any who have known such loss will find acknowledgement and comfort in her lines. All language lovers will appreciate her artistry. The book is a darkly sparkling gem. by Patricia Nordyke Pando for Story Circle Book Reviews [...] reviewing books by, for, and about women
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