Jack Gilbert

(This review of Jack Gilbert's Collected Poems originally appeared in Harvard Review Online)

Jack Gilbert’s first book, Views of Jeopardy, appeared in the Yale Younger Poets series in 1962. Soon out of print, it became a kind of cult classic. Gilbert’s revision of the classical lyric in a terse, colloquial modern idiom provided a brisk alternative to the beat and confessional voices coming into vogue. But twenty years of near silence ensued, until in 1982 he published Monolithos, which reprinted most of the first book and added a few new ones. Gilbert’s modest output still made him one of the most admired poets of the post-Lowell / Bishop generation. The publication of The Great Fires in 1995 significantly enhanced his reputation.  The poems about the death of his wife struck a tragic note that resonated with those who deplored the lack of drama and emotion in much contemporary poetry. Since then he has published two more books, making his old age (he is now eighty-seven) seem far more prolific than his youth. Now he has gathered this material, with twenty-one additional poems, into a Collected Poems more substantial than anyone would have predicted, given the output of his early years.

Reviewers typically dwell on the apparent simplicity of Gilbert’s poetry, its tendency toward statement, its lack of stanza breaks, its blocky form, and its candid emotional themes. “Plain-spoken, unmetered, pared to essentials,” claims Dwight Garner in a recent review.  But this describes what his poetry lacks rather than what it accomplishes. Gilbert’s best poems may seem readily grasped, but they are aesthetically complex and emotionally oblique. They layer imagery and registers of diction to construct small but highly charged worlds in which the slightest nuance can be life-changing. The tone is consistently elegiac, and leaves little room for the jokiness currently fashionable.  Irony abounds, but some reviewers are oblivious to it, and consequently miss the self-critical stance the speaker takes toward his own experience. The experience referenced in the later books is painful. Gilbert’s wife, Michiko Nogami, a sculptor, died of cancer in 1982. She was only thirty-six. She haunts Gilbert’s poetry, but so do many other women, including Linda Gregg, his partner for some years. He mourns the death of their relationship almost as poignantly as he does the actual death of Michiko. But elegy, however authentic, requires no triggering event; it is a way of seeing the world. The elegiac tone dominates even Views of Jeopardy, published long before the tragedy of life fully enveloped him.

“Recovering amid the Farms” (142) typifies Gilbert’s oblique aesthetic perceptions. The poem opens by toying with elements of the pastoral elegy:

Every morning the sad girl brings her three sheep

and two lambs laggardly to the top of the valley,

past my stone hut and onto the mountain to graze.

This could be a moment from Theocritus or Virgil, but the child’s sadness, we learn, turns not on the loss of a beloved but on her father’s determination to keep her out of the modern world:

            She turned twelve last year and it was legal

for the father to take her out of school. She knows

her life is over.

And now the speaker’s irony intervenes: “The sadness makes her fine, / makes me happy” because her presence not only completes the mock-pastoral scene but aesthetically enhances it:  “Her old red sweater makes / the whole valley ring, makes my solitude gleam.” In turn, his presence, although she may not realize it, enhances her dreary life: “I watch from hiding for her sake. Knowing I am / there is hard on her, but it is the focus of her days.” The astonishing egoism of this observation turns the whole poem in on itself. Far from being a pastoral elegy or pastoral anything, the poem is a profound self-critique of a life lived for the sake of aesthetic sensation. It is an argument against the notion of pure poetry, yet it also asks the reader to acknowledge the elegance of this willfully self-regarding perception:

            She always looks down or looks away as she passes

in the evening. Except sometimes when, just before

going out of sight behind the distant canebrake,

she looks quickly back. It is too far for me to see,

but there is a moment of white as she turns her face. 

The closure echoes Stanley Kunitz’s powerful “Father and Son”: “Among the turtles and the lilies he turned to me / The white ignorant hollow of his face” as well as the glimpse of whiteness in Robert Frost’s “For Once, Then, Something”: “What was that whiteness? / Truth? A pebble of quartz?  For once, then, something.”  In all three poems, this glimpse of white answers a question the speaker hasn’t known how to ask. Also in all of these poems this whiteness looms over a gap between speaker and subject that embodies the difficulty of grasping the ineffable: the aesthetic, social, or psychological ideal. That ideal also emerges as emotional defiance. When the “girl shepherd” recurs in “A Kind of Courage” the speaker consoles her for her situation through an ironic contrast with  woman who loses her mind and undergoes serial rape, an ordeal that generates in the speaker a vision of “singing and dancing / and throwing down flowers nevertheless.” (257)

            Few contemporary poets write as paradoxically, ironically, and subtly as this. Fewer still can manipulate the elements of classical lyric genres to enrich the postmodern idiom of quotidian speech. Gilbert works this vein even in his grim Pittsburgh poems, in which America’s industrial dark, gloomy as Hades cross-grained with Blake’s dark satanic mills, gives way to high modernist irony:

            He thinks of the multitude of giant rats he killed

in those cavernous, Sunday-empty, neon-dark

steel mills. Remembers piling them up

on winter nights, the weight of each one after

the other. White mist on the black river outside.  (“Factoring,” 162)

In Gilbert’s white-on-black world nothing is simple, even when established in the plainest diction. White mist concealing a river is the negative reversal of a poem’s black type concealing (but also defining) a page. In our discourse-world of binary oppositions, concealment is the other face of revelation. William Logan claims in a review of Refusing Heaven that Gilbert’s poems “are interesting, not for the honesties they intend, but for the ones they conceal.”  But they aren’t concealing honesties: they are working to uncover them. Like all genuine honesties they are hard to find because the world itself has concealed them. Gilbert’s best poems—and certainly he has his clinkers—require subtle and ironic readers to appreciate them. If that makes their essential honesty difficult, it is difficult in the way that Frost (in “Directive”) required, “so the wrong ones can’t find it, / So can’t get saved.” Poetry like Gilbert’s doesn’t seek to save everyone, but a few perceptive readers may get lucky.