Refusing Heaven: Poems

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.

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'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.

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.

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.