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Monday, March 06, 2006
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Jack Gilbert... ... a poet whose Refusing Heaven just won the Book Critics Award, was a known substance to old UD, because the online magazine, Slate, did an intriguing story about him a few months ago. She’d never heard of him before the Slate thing. She ordered a used paperback copy of his earlier book, The Great Fires: Poems 1982-1992, and liked it a lot. His direct-statement nature-and-spirit poems reminded her of the poet Linda Gregg, which isn’t surprising because it turns out they used to be married to each other. Both of them write more or less sonnet-length blank verse of sweet simplicity about the beauty of the earth and the turbulent passions of the people on it. UD hadn’t heard of Gilbert before because after winning the 1962 Yale Younger Poets Series award, he retreated to Greece and obscurity. He still wrote poetry, but not much of it. He asks himself, in the poem “Going Wrong,” why he did this, why he lives alone on a dry Greek island. The Lord insists: “You are the one who chooses Gilbert’s story reminds UD of Camus’s thing for coastal Algeria. Both men seek stark terrain where they can sense their highly charged inner life as well as the eventual aridity nature has in store for them. The Slate writer puts it extremely well: Gilbert’s is a struggle (never successful) to erase the ego. This struggle, needless to say, was the kind of idea much bandied about in the 1960s and '70s but rarely acted upon, let alone truly lived by. Taken together, Gilbert's poems capture what it might be to live out a spiritual quest for authenticity, helpfully set against a classical backdrop of Mediterranean blues and bleached-out whites. ... [Gilbert concludes that] solitude is the only way to know one's place in the world. ...[His poetry is] rescuing from the debilitating forces of cynicism a conviction that transcendence can await us in this world. This is an existential greediness, I guess, since it demands a renunciation of the social world. Camus went back and forth between his politically committed life in Paris and his silences in Tipasa and Djemila and Algiers, but Gilbert appears to be brazening it out over there for the duration. He occasionally takes visiting professorships, I gather, to support his life on the island. Along with greed, there’s a certain cowardice in this withdrawing gesture. Many of Gilbert’s poems in The Great Fires record his effort to make time stop, to avoid the shabby anxious ordinary life which despite his efforts comes to him: He lives in the barrens, in dying neighborhoods Although straightforward in address, these are sly stylish poems. Look at all the “alls” and “ells” and “ills” snaking through this lyric, giving it its lilt and trill. The Slate writer concludes: Gilbert isn't just a remarkable poet. He's a poet whose directness and lucidity ought to appeal to lots of readers—the same readers who can't abide the inward-gazing obscurity of much contemporary poetry. Indeed, what's powerful about Gilbert is that he is a rarity, especially in this day and age: the poet who stands outside his own time, practicing a poetics of purity in an ever-more cacophonous world—a lyrical ghost, you might say, from a literary history that never came to be. Jack Gilbert is the anti-Jorie Graham. |