Refusing Heaven: Poems

by Jack Gilbert

More than a decade after Jack Gilbert’s The Great Fires , this highly anticipated new collection shows the continued development of a poet who has remained fierce in his avoidance of the beaten path. In Refusing Heaven , Gilbert writes compellingly about the commingled passion, loneliness, and sometimes surprising happiness of a life spent in luminous understanding of his own blessings and “The days and nights wasted . . . Long hot afternoons / watching ants while the cicadas railed / in the Chinese elm about the brevity of life.” Time slows down in these poems, as Gilbert creates an aura of curiosity and wonder at the fact of existence itself. Despite powerful intermittent griefs–over the women he has parted from or the one lost to cancer (an experience he captures with intimate precision)–Gilbert’s choice in this volume is to “refuse heaven.” He prefers this life, with its struggle and alienation and delight, to any paradise. His work is both a rebellious assertion of the call to clarity and a profound affirmation of the world in all its aspects. It braces the reader in its humanity and heart.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction, Memoir, Death, 21st Century, Poetry Plays, The United States Of America

112 pages, Paperback

First published March 8, 2005

About the author

Born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S.'s neighborhood of East Liberty, he attended Peabody High School then worked as a door-to-door salesman, an exterminator, and a steelworker. He graduated from the University of Pittsburgh, where he and his classmate Gerald Stern developed a serious interest in poetry and writing.

His work is distinguished by simple lyricism and straightforward clarity of tone. Though his first book of poetry (Views of Jeopardy, 1962) was quickly recognized and Gilbert himself made into something of a media darling, he retreated from his earlier activity in the San Francisco poetry scene (where he participated in Jack Spicer's Poetry as Magic workshop) and moved to Europe, touring from country to country while living on a Guggenheim Fellowship. Nearly the whole of his career after the publication of his first book of poetry is marked by what he has described in interviews as a self-imposed isolation—which some have considered to be a spiritual quest to describe his alienation from mainstream American culture, and others have dismissed as little more than an extended period as a "professional houseguest" living off of wealthy American literary admirers. Subsequent books of poetry have been few and far between. He continued to write, however, and between books has occasionally contributed to The American Poetry Review, Genesis West, The Quarterly, Poetry, Ironwood, The Kenyon Review, and The New Yorker.

He was a close friend of the poet Linda Gregg who was once his student and to whom he was married for six years. He was also married to Michiko Nogami (a language instructor based in San Francisco, now deceased, about whom he has written many of his poems). He was also in a significant long term relationship with the Beat poet Laura Ulewicz during the fifties in San Francisco.

Reviews

[Edita · Rating 5 out of 5]

What we are given is taken away,
but we manage to keep it secretly.
We lose everything, but make harvest
of the consequence it was to us. Memory
builds this kingdom from the fragments
and approximation. We are gleaners who fill
the barn for the winter that comes on.

[Uroš Đurković · Rating 5 out of 5]

„Mi smo jedinstvenost koja buku pretvara u muziku, jer
moramo žuriti. Letina su nam usamljenost i
žudnja u bezizražajnoj pustoši kosmosa.” (93)

Gilbertova poezija pleni pristupačnošču koja, iako ne pripitomljava svet, čini ga bližim. Gotovo da ovim stihovima provejava duh neke rasterećujuće skrušenosti, ali nipošto povlačenja ili odustajanja. Gilbert briljantno kondenzuje iskustvo i uspeva da spas i svežinu pronađe u svakodnevici, kao najbolji pesnici iskustva. Stihovi „Odbijanja raja”, bez obzira na biblijsku naznaku u naslovu, rasterećeni su od bilo kakve potrebe za hermetizmom i intelektualizmom. Njeno utemeljenje nije, dakle, u književnosti, već životu i upravo kroz takve, životom natopljene stihove, Gilbert dolazi i do tišine kao zvuka vodopada, treperavih jasika, iskušenja erosa, čuda poniruća i Boga. Pravo je umeće doći do visina pomoću sasvim običnih reči.

I mada znam da to neposredne veze sa poezijom nema, ne mogu da ne primetim da Gilbert kako Nenad Jovanović ističe u pogovoru, nije završio srednju školu, te da je radio u lokalnoj čeličani, ali i kao putujući trgovac i istrebljivač gamadi. Poezija se, uprkos svemu, ili nosi u sebi ili ne. I to nije elitistička priča, nego okolnost sklonosti – različiti ljudi imaju u sebi usađene različite potencijale i sklonosti. A Gilbert je, zaobilazeći zakon, ipak uspeo da bude student univerziteta u svom rodnom Pitsburgu i da, uprkos izvesnim problemima, tu i diplomira. Nakon studija počinje da radi kao novinar i kreće sa objavljivanjem poetskih zbirki, koje su imale i solidnu recepciju. Igrom slučaja, putuje svetom, što se i te kako odrazilo na njegovo delo – dovoljno je videti, na primer, kako se u ovoj zbirci piše o Mediteranu, srčano, domaće i otmeno:

„Nepokretnost smo
kad moćno podne Mediterana ukine čak i glasje
insekata uz urušenu seosku kuću...” (65)

Uvek je radost kada se srpska književnost obogati sjajnim prevodom poezije. Nenad Jovanović, i sam pesnik, našao je pravi ton, dobru meru, ne želeći, što je, inače, greška mnogih, da se njegov glas nadvikuje s Gilbertom. Dobro prevođenje nije navlačenje na svoju vodenicu, već pronalaženje strategija da se duh dela u drugom jeziku ne izneveri.

[Tracy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an exquisite book. It is heart-breaking and I've read and re-read it so many times I've lost count. An old man looks back on his life. He remembers old lovers and former wives. He remembers his wife who died of cancer when she was in her thirties. It is achingly lovely. It hurts in a good way to read this.
As an addendum there is an excellent critical review of this book on slate.com, written by Megan O'Rourke. Just search for the book title or Jack Gilbert.

[Jan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Here's a poet who writes about his time with specificity and perspective at the same time, able to step in and out of the period in which he lives. The poems are about both time and timelessness, and are often of stunning beauty. Their only drawback for me as a woman is that they are so masculine. Making love to women is a way for Gilbert to know God, but he can never place himself inside a woman's mind, nor can a woman be a real poet for him. The women in his poems may be adored, but they are always objects, not subjects.

[James Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'd read this before, though I'm unsure exactly when. I came to it again after having been impressed with the Jack Gilbert I found in a Paris Review interview. Refusing Heaven hadn't previously dazzled me--I don't remember it and I'd rated it low in the systems we play with. I suspect I read it too fast because I now think it's not poetry to be easily dismissed. I saw so much more this reading. You begin poems as refined as these as if you're approaching a still, quiet pool. But in each the lightning cast of language creates currents of emotion that tug at the reader. Gilbert trolls with truth to define the longing and dreaming he says are in everything. Each poem uses this quality to being Gilbert's tenor to the surface. These poems are beautiful, sensitive things. They seem as chiseled and direct as Oriental verse. I think the influence is apparent: he lived in Japan for a time, and one of the blazing loves of his life, and a subject here, was a Michiko. There's much to admire. I use colorful Post-It page markers to flag memorable passages in books. When I'd finished Refusing Heaven, the edge of the book looked like the Tibetan hillsides you see strung with prayer flags. The Orient again.

[Gill LeBlanc · Rating 1 out of 5]

kind of like bukowski if he drank aperol spritzes instead of beer and didn’t have that dirtbag edge to keep you interested…

kind of like colin bridgerton because of how they both never shut up about their “travels”…

kind of like pythagoras because of how much they both talk about beans…

[Shruti · Rating 2 out of 5]

Poetry is just not my thing :(

[Eli · Rating 5 out of 5]

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. 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.

—Jack Gilbert, "Failing and Flying"

[Mattea Gernentz · Rating 4 out of 5]

"We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure, / but not delight. Not enjoyment. / We must have / the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless / furnace of this world. To make injustice the only / measure of our attention is to praise the Devil. / If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down, / we should give thanks that the end had magnitude. / We must admit there will be music despite everything" (A Brief for the Defense, 3).

(Thank you for the recommendation, Grace!) #TheSealeyChallenge

[Dana · Rating 3 out of 5]

I purchased the book because I fell in love with Failing and Flying. I think overall, the book was okay. Not crazy about most of the poems.

Most of the women he writes about seem pretty f*cked up, crying about first loves, crying for no reason, etc. I found myself getting annoyed that we were constantly portrayed as these uncommunicative emotional basket cases. Maybe most of his romantic experiences have been with nutty gals. Who knows....

There are a few good poems in this book, but Gilbert's at his best when he isn't describing women.

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Refusing Heaven by Jack Gilbert

Refusing Heaven garnered the eighty year old Gilbert the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry in 2005. Given his age most of the poems are written in the rear view mirror but there is a lot of hope here too.

So here are my favorite poems from the collection.

1. A Brief for the Defense - a poem about finding delight in the midst of a world full of sorrow. A great opening poem that sets the tone for the whole collection.

2. Once Upon A Time - a man remembers his first kiss when he thought intensity equated to marriage.

3. The Rooster - the line begins with “They killed the rooster, thank God”. You see the rooster wasn’t doing his job.

4. Failing and Flying - a simple and beautiful and inspiring poem that invokes Icarus and why he wasn’t a failure.

5. Adults - the title sums up this short poem

6. Bring in the Gods - a reflective poem about perspective and being older as he renders summaries of past relationships

7. Refusing Heaven - a vote against Jesus and finding happiness in one’s own life. A famous poem.

8. Moreover - beautiful poem with some memorable lines

What we are given is taken away, but we manage to keep it secretly. We lose everything, but make harvest of the consequence it was to us.

I enjoyed Gilbert’s poetry - it’s unpretentious, sparse, heavy on both imagery and experience with plenty of remembrances of the women he loved.

5 stars

[Blake Petteway · Rating 4 out of 5]

been very into the great poets of the 20th century. been working slowly through this one and chewing on its many passionate and vivid images. precise, contained free verse.

Standouts:
1. Résumé
2. The Butternut Tree at Fort Juniper
3. The Manger of Incidentals
4. Moreover
5. Getting Away With It

[Eliana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poems about divided selves haunted by yet healing from the past, in their own way.

“So many of the words are for meanwhile. We say, / ‘I love you’ while we search for language / that can be heard.” (The Butternut Tree at Fort Juniper)

“She waded / through their old hatred picking up / the sketches as each in turn blew down / in the wind running before the storm.” (Ylapa)

“… Giving thanks for what we are allowed / to think about it, grateful for it even as it wanes [. . .] All of it a blessing. The being there. Being alive then. / Like a giant bell ringing long after you can’t hear it.” (Burma)

The trouble with library books is that you must give them back. And refrain, gently, from writing in the margins your various love letters to words and the ache of existence and knowledge. And then you must justify to yourself, all over again, that you simply must have your own copy of this book, except this time the argument is less convincing because you’ve already read the text.

[C · Rating 2 out of 5]

I purchased this book a couple of years ago but never finished it. It somehow inadvertently ended up shelved along with books I had read and remained hidden there.

Recently, I read Gilbert's fantastic The Dance Most of All and sought this out as I remembered that I had purchased it before.

Unfortunately, I found why I had lost interest in it. I can't really put my finger on why I liked this volume so much less. The opening poem, A Brief For The Defense, was a great start and many of the poems are good. I just couldn't "connect" with this book nearly as much as the other (for lack of a better term).

I think I owe this one a reread down the line.

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

One the best collections I've read in some time. Imagine a humble, wiser Hemingway turning into a recluse and taking up poetry. Gilbert's descriptive powers do remind me of Hemingway. Lot's of short sentences, but the poems never seem choppy. And unlike Hemingway, there always seems to be a transcendent aspect to these poems. But Gilbert never drifts off. He's rooted in the here and now, and he does love the ladies. I hope to expand on this later, but this is going to be a busy week & weekend. (Getting our son back to college.)

[Corey Wozniak · Rating 5 out of 5]

2020, quarantine: Re-read just the dog-eared poems, and spent April memorizing the oh-so-wise "A Brief for the Defense." If you see me, keep me accountable and ask me to recite it!


####

Some to return to:

“A Brief for the Defense”; “Kunstkammer”; “Flying and Falling”; “The Rooster”; “Burning (Andante Non Tripp’s)”; “Homage to Wang Wei”; “Happily Planting The Beans Too Early”; “The Lost Hotels of Paris”; “The Manger of Incidentals”

[Galina Krasskova · Rating 2 out of 5]

Occasionally potent phrases, tight, carefully crafted references to Tolstoy, Wordsworth, Basho, Keats, et al, but in the end, never, ever transcendent.

[gail ♛ · Rating 1 out of 5]

These poems just didn’t speak to me. I’m sure they’re meant for someone out there, but that person is just not me.

[McKay Menden · Rating 3 out of 5]

There were a handful of deeply touching and beautiful poems, and then there were all the other ones

[Sienna · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like Jack Gilbert, and I wish I'd bothered to read more of his work before he passed away. Because he brings to life images like this:

Once she said the world was an astonishing animal:
light was its spirit and noise was its mind.
That it was composed to feed on honor, but did not.
Another time she warned me about walking on the lawns
at night. Told me of heavy birds that flew after dark
croaking, "Feathers or lead, stone or fire?"
Mounting people who gave the wrong answer and riding
them like horses across the whole country, beating them
with their powerful wings.

(from "Feathers or Lead")

Refusing Heaven does so by celebrating what comes first: women loved deeply, the deep, resonant ringing of bells and the knowledge of silence that comes with the end of long solitude. These poems inhabit damp valleys, semi-snow-covered chiaroscuro peaks, interstitial moments marking the end of one season and the beginning of another, loss and renewal. They sleep with one woman while seeking forgiveness from, reunion with, another; they fill their days with indolence as easily as poetic productivity, "relishing our mortality, / waltzing slowly without purpose. Neglecting / the future." They're unreasonable, as in the exquisite "Homesteading," and uncompromising. With them, Gilbert exhorts us not to diminish this life's experiences as inferior, insignificant preludes to the next, merely to be endured and forgotten. No: he relishes each transient moment of perfection as it happens, and then he holds on to it as it persists in imperfect memory. He does the best he can, and it's enough.

What we are given is taken away,
but we manage to keep it secretly.
We lose everything, but make harvest
of the consequence it was to us. Memory
builds this kingdom from the fragments
and approximation.

(from "Moreover")

What he loses, what really matters, he nevertheless manages to keep:

The body keeps so little of the life after
being with her eleven years,
and the mouth not even that much. But the heart
is different. It never forgets
the pine trees with the moon rising behind them
every night. Again and again we put our
sweet ghosts on small paper boats and sailed
them back into their death, each moving slowly
into the dark, disappearing as our hearts
visited and savored, hurt and yearned.

(from "Kunstkammer")

I breezed through this collection without feeling much emotional investment or involvement in spite of all the emotion that went into it. Gilbert's attachment to sentence fragments even kept my intellectual giddiness at bay much of the time, though I feel certain this stylistic decision was as deliberate as his curious line breaks. And yet... looking back at the lines that caught my eye the first time around, I find myself even more taken with them, with the knots he skillfully ties and tightens and then reveals to be slips, simple and illusory, or the most reliable bond the world has ever known. There are so many highlights, more than I can possibly articulate here without writing an insufferable review. I want to tell you to read "Bring in the Gods" and "The Friendship Inside Us." I want to remember that in "Burma" he describes being alive as a "giant bell ringing long after you can't hear it." I want you to wonder who's doing the watching in "Maybe She Is Here," since Gilbert's supposedly still asleep. But it may be easiest to connect with the rare, unexpected moments of humor, as in "Say You Love Me," whose angels are really ghosts:

I am haunted
by the feeling that she is saying
melting lords of death, avalanches,
rivers and moments of passing through.
And I am replying, "Yes, yes.
Shoes and pudding."

The poems that take an openly philosophical tack do so a bit self-consciously, and are more successful for it. (All poems that allude to Magritte lead me back to Howard Nemerov, which isn't a bad thing.) My favorite is "'Tis Here! 'Tis Here! 'Tis Gone! (The Nature of Presence)." Like many of the pieces in this collection, it features former lovers.

A white horse, Linda Gregg wrote, is not a horse,
quoting what Hui Shih said twenty-three hundred
years ago. The thing is not its name, is not
the words. The painting of a pipe is not a pipe
regardless of what the title claims. An intelligent
poet in Iowa is frightened because she thinks
we are made of electrons. The Gianna Gelmetti
I loved was a presence ignited in a swarm
of energy, but the ghost living in the mansion
is not the building. Consciousness is not
matter dreaming. If all the stars were added
together they would still not know it's spring.
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. The intimate body of the Valerie
I know is not the secret body my friend knows.
The luster of her breasts is conditional:
clothed or not, desired or too familiar.
The fact of them is mediated by morning
or the depth of night when it's pouring down rain.
The reason we cannot enter the same woman
twice is not because the mesh of energy flexes.
   It is a mystery separate from both matter and electrons. It is not why the Linda looking out over the Aegean is not the Linda eating melon in Kentucky, nor explains how the mind lives amid the rain without being part of it. The dead lady Nogami-san lives now only in me, in the momentary occasion I am. Her whiteness in me is the color of pale amber in winter light.

I love how these various women live on in Gilbert's head and heart, and in his representations of them. The one who slept in his bed "like a visitation, the gentleness in her / like antelope standing in the dawn mist." The one who "cried yesterday / when they walked in the woods, but she didn't want / to talk about it. Her suffering will be explained, / but she will be unknown nevertheless." (We've all known that woman; we've all been that woman.) These accounts of love are complex, overflowing, as are Gilbert's descriptions of marriage as a state of aloneness, a "landfall and the setting forth. / A dearness and vessel." Death, literal and metaphorical, fills the spaces between his words. From "Infidelity": "Now he knows she is living inside him, / as the wind is sometimes visible / in the trees. As the roses and rhubarb / are in the garden and then not." The tension between that presence and the perspective absence provides makes this collection shiver and hum with the emotion I somehow missed the first time around. Because now, reading "The Butternut Tree at Fort Juniper," which isn't actually about a butternut tree, whatever that is, but instead plants placeholding roots for talking about something profoundly important, I can't help but feel:

It reminds me how mutable language is. Keats
would leave blank places in his drafts to hold on
to his passion, spaces for the right words to come.
We use them sideways. The way we automatically
add bits of shape to hold on to the dissolving dreams.
So many of the words are for meanwhile. We say
"I love you" while we search for language
that can be heard. Which allows us to talk
about how the aspens over there tremble
in the smallest shower, while the tree over by
the window here gathers the raindrops and lets them
go in bunches. The way my heart carols sometimes,
and other times yearns. Sometimes is quiet
and other times is powerfully quiet.

Refusing Heaven is both, and more.

[Ray Nessly · Rating 4 out of 5]

One poem in its entirety, followed by several excerpts

DUENDE

I can't remember her name.
It's not as though I've been in bed
with that many women.
The truth is I can't even remember
her face. I kind of know how strong
her thighs were, and her beauty.
But what I won't forget
is the way she tore open
the barbecued chicken with her hands,
and wiped the grease on her breasts

Excerpts:

FAILING AND FLYING

Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.

A BRIEF FOR THE DEFENSE

We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.

THE LOST HOTELS OF PARIS

We look up at the stars and they are
not there. We see the memory
of when they were, once upon a time.
And that too is more than enough.

[Giselle A Nguyen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have been reading a few of these poems aloud to myself each day of the lockdown period, which has been a lovely, grounding experience.

I came to Jack Gilbert in 2016, when a stranger sent me “Failing and Flying”, which immediately floored me. Unfortunately the rest of the collection didn’t have as much of an impact.

Gilbert is a product of his time, but the way he speaks about women ranges from fetishising as muse, to throwaway – F&F is one of the only good poems about love that he’s written. The best work here is that which speaks to his own human spirit and experience separate from romance. He is quite funny and has a charming observational eye for tiny details, which I appreciated.

“I want to fail. I am hungry for what I am becoming” – this is the kind of stuff that stays with me. Nothing else.

[Lilli Hirth · Rating 3 out of 5]

Perhaps a 3.2-3.4 if it really came down to it. There were poems I liked and others I didn’t. There were sparse entries that truly stopped me in my tracks, and bits and pieces I simply had to write down to remember.

A moment in particular: “We are a singularity that makes music out of noise because we must hurry. We make a harvest of loneliness and desiring in the blank wasteland of the cosmos.” I love all thoughts like this - Very “If we were vampires” by Jason Isbell, no? But he’s neither the first nor last person to have that train of thought.

There were also many poems that I did not relate to, perhaps more than the ones I did. And the author explored a very interesting relationship with faith and Christ… in summary, solid, but maybe not a re-read (with the exception of ~4 poems).

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don’t read much poetry, probably because it was ruined for me in college.
I should try and read more.
Gilbert’s poems are straight forward and easily accessible.
…”love is not refuted because it comes to an end…”

A bit more of my Gilbert favorites:
The Rooster:
They killed the rooster because he could feel nothing for the six frumpy hens.

The Lost Hotels of Paris:
The Lord gives everything and charges by taking it back. What a bargain.

Bring In The Gods:
What will you do? she asks.
I will continue north, carrying the past in my arms, flying into winter.

The Sweet Taste of Night:
When I woke up my head was saying, “ The world will pardon my mush, but I’ve got a crush”

‘ Tis Here!
The thing is not it’s name, is not it’s words.

The Abandoned Valley:
Can you understand being alone so long
You would go outside in the middle of the night
And put a bucket into the well
So you could feel something down there
tug at the other end of the rope?

Burning:
We are all burning in time
But each is consumed at his own speed.
Each is the product of his spirit’s refraction, of the inflection of that mind.

Burma:
Used, misled, cheated. Our time always shortening.
What we cherish always temporary. What we love is, sooner or later, changed. But for a while we can visit our other life. Can rejoice in its being there in its absence. Giving thanks for what we are allowed to think about it, grateful for it even as it wanes. For knowing it is there….

The Manger of Incidentals:
The lamb is born into happiness and is eaten on Easter.
We are blessed with powerful love and it goes away.
We can mourn. We live the strangeness of being momentary, and still we are exalted by being temporary…

[Corie Sanford · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh. My. Good. God.

[Rachel Edney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jack Gilbert forever ❤️

[B. Zelkovich · Rating 3 out of 5]

I bounced off a lot of these initially, but the further I went the more I found myself settling into his voice.

additional poems I liked:

infidelity
a taste for grit and whatever

[Grace · Rating 5 out of 5]

Icarus.

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm always acutely aware when a writer writes about writing (or when a poet writes about writing poetry). Here, Jack Gilbert aligns himself with writers who write about their craft. Indeed, there are many poems in this collection that fall under this category. What saves Jack Gilbert from succumbing to the indulgence that frequently consumes writer who write about writing is the diversity of his approaches. Indeed, the poet seems to be capturing the subject from many angles, changing/shifting his perspective to avoid repeating himself (or repeating others).

He writes about poetry and language itself...

Is it the song of nevertheless,
or of the empire of our heart? We carry
language as our mind, but are we
the dead whale that sinks grandly
for years to reach the bottom of us?
- What Song Should We Sing? (pg. 6)

It reminds me how mutable language is. Keats
would leave blank places in his drafts to hold on
to his passion, spaces for the right words to come.
- The Butternut Tree At Fort Juniper (pg. 41)

He writes about his development as a young poet...

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 nightingale....
- Less Being More (pg. 39)

He writes addressing poetry directly in a voice reminiscent of Richard Brautigan. The allusion to Brautigan is made all the more apparent by a reference to trout (Brautigan is best remembered for his book Trout Fishing in America )...

I feel so bad today
that I don't want to write a poem.
I don't care: any poem, this
poem.
- Richard Brautigan, "April 7, 1969" (from Rommel Drives On Deep Into Egypt)

Poem, you sonofabitch, it's bad enough
that I embarrass myself working so hard
to get it right even a little,
and that little grudging and awkward.
But it's afterwards I resent, when
the sweet sure should hold me like
a trout in the bright summer stream.
- Doing Poetry

He writes about writing poetry, likening it to a bird listening to other birds sing, remaining silent, deliberating over what song it should sing...

There is a wren sitting in the branches
of my spirit and it chooses not to sing.
It is listening to learn its song.
- Trying To Write Poetry (pg. 46)

His poems vary in length, from a page to a few lines. His longer poems tend to be somewhat rambling. But this rambling is one of his strengths. Whereas the shorter poems are reminiscent of Brautigan, varying between zen-like profundity and clown-like parody...

The glare of the Greek sun
on our stone house
is not so white
as the pale moonlight on it.
- Truth (pg. 23)

I remember how I'd lie on my roof
listening to the fat violinist
below in the sleeping village
play Schubert so badly, so well.
- The Reinvention Of Happiness (pg. 72)

The Greek fishermen do not
play on the beach and I don't
write funny poems.
- Metier (pg. 89)

Only you and I still stand in the snow on Highland Avenue
in Pittsburgh waiting for the blundering iron streetcars
that never came. Only you know how the immense storms
over the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers were the scale
I wanted. Nobody but you remembers Peabody High School.
You shared my youth in Paris and the hills above Como.
And later, in Seattle. It was you playing the aria from
Don Giovanni over and over, filling the forest of Puget
Sound with the music. You in the front room and me
upstairs with your discarded wife in my bed. The sound
of your loneliness pouring over our happy bodies.
You were with your third wife when I was in Perugia
six months later, but in love with somebody else.
We searched for her in Munich, the snow falling again.
You trying to decide when to kill yourself. All of it
finally bringing us to San Francisco. To the vast
decaying white house. No sound of Mozart coming up
from there. No alleluias in you anymore. No longer
will you waltz under the chandeliers in Paris salons
drunk with champagne and the Greek girl as the others
stand along the mirrored walls. The men watching
with fury, the eyes of the women inscrutable. No one
else speaks the language of those years. No one
remembers you as the Baron. The streetcars have
finished the last run, and I am walking home. Thinking
love is not refuted because it comes to an end.
- Elegy For Bob (Jean McLean) (pg. 11)

Among his friends, for whom many of his poems are named, to whom many of his poems are dedicated, the poet includes Allen Ginsberg and Ken Kesey...

There were a hundred wild people in Allen's
three-story house. He was sitting at a small
table in the kitchen quietly eating something.
Alone, except for Orlovsky's little brother
who was asleep with his face against the wall.
- Halloween (pg. 10)

Ginsberg came to my house one afternoon
and said he was giving up poetry
because it told lies, that language distorts.
I agreed, but asked what we have
that gets it right even that much.
- The Lost Hotels Of Paris (pg. 53)

Ken Kesey sitting in the woods,
beyond his fence of whitewashed motorcycles, said when
he was writing on acid he was not writing about it.
- Beyond Pleasure (pg. 75)

What I don't like about the poet... His preoccupation with God. His portrayal of women (portrayals that suggest the poet holds dated attitudes/opinions). I can neither relate to his preoccupations nor his attitudes on these subjects...

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.
- Moreover (pg. 65)

When he's not writing about God and/or women, the poet frequently evokes birds and loneliness...

Birds...

Told me of heavy birds that flew after dark
croaking, "Feathers or lead, stone or fire?"
- Feathers Or Lead (pg. 54)

In the morning, he watches the two nuthatches,
the pair of finches with their new son.
And the chickadees....
- The Garden (pg. 57)

I lie awake remembering the birds of Kyoto
calling No No, unh unh. No No, unh unh. And you
saying yes all night....
- A Kind Of Decorum (pg. 66)

He wakes up in the silence of the winter woods,
the silence of birds not singing, knowing he will
not hear his voice all day....
- Not The Happiness But The Consequence Of Happiness (pg. 70)

Loneliness...

"And," she said, "you must talk no more
about ecstasy. It is a loneliness."
- Naked Except For The Jewelry (pg. 4)

Can you understand being alone so long
you would go out in the middle of the night
and put a bucket into the well
so you could feel something down there
tug at the other end of the rope?
- The Abandoned Valley (pg. 25)

We come from a deep forest of years
into a valley of an unknown country
called loneliness....
- The Garden (pg. 57)

We make a harvest of loneliness
and desiring in the blank wasteland of the cosmos.
- The Manger Of Incidentals (pg. 83)

My favourite passages...

I walked hungry through the vacant streets at night
with the snow falling wordlessly in the dark like petals
on the last of the nineteenth century....
- How Much Of That Is Left In Me? (pg. 29)

The painting of a pipe is not a pipe
regardless of what the title claims. An intelligent
poet in Iowa is frightened because she thinks
we are made of electrons....
- 'Tis Here! 'Tis Here! 'Tis Gone! (The Nature Of Presence) (pg. 30)

She came into his life like arriving halfway
through a novel, with bits of two earlier lives
snagged in her....
- "My Eyes Adored You" (pg. 74)

We are surrounded by the absurd excess of the universe.
By meaningless bulk, vastness without size,
power without consequence. The stubborn iteration
that is present without being felt.
Nothing the spirit can marry. Merely phenomenon
and its physics. An endless, endless of going on.
No habitat where the brain can recognize itself.
- The Manger Of Incidentals (pg. 83)

[Nicholas During · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bit torn about this book. In many regards they are truly beautiful poems, written in a down-to-earth style with beautiful imagery and flights into metaphysics that I really enjoy going on while reading poetry. It's also a wonderful look at a truly poetic life, from the point of the person leading it, and this cannot be discounted. One may be bitter that one's own life if not as poetic as free as Gilbert's, but that's not his fault. In summary it strikes me a kind of classical modern poetry, if that makes any sense, probably a definition helped by the frequent Grecian settings of the poems.

And I guess this is where my problem comes too. I don't get the sense that Gilbert is going out to be original and really do something new with language and poetry. And that's kind of what I want with contemporary poetry. Though my criticism is fairly shallow since I really did enjoy most of the poems, some a lot, and read the whole thing through in a couple of days. I don't feel completely confident in my judgement of poetry so take this all with a grain of salt. Still, I recommend it to anyone like myself who is trying to understand how poetry works, cause this does. And, if not groundbreaking, it does what it does well.