Reading Log: And the Dance Most of All (Jack Gilbert)

August 1, 2009

I’ve held off reading the last few poems in Jack Gilbert’s latest (The Dance Most of All) for months. Literally. Gilbert is one of those rare touchstone authors I was just ruminating about (finishing this book, in fact, inspired those brief thoughts) and– as much as I hate to mention it again– I really do worry, selfishly, that this might be his last.

Many of the poems in this collection convey a sense of finality. Not of the end, but of ending. Of being able to accept the ineffable and that doing so isn’t giving up even if it isn’t transcending it either… at least not in the way we might dream of for most of our life.

More than any other poems except, perhaps, Ray Carver’s, Gilbert writes a poetry that I cannot (and will no longer attempt to) explicate. I can only point to it and ask– even plead– "See? See?" Gilbert’s poetry is unadorned. He has a manner without being mannered, but is wholly identifiable– I can easily tell a Jack Gilbert poem in a few lines and just as easily distinguish an imitator. It’s a kind of poetry that is easy to parody, filled with references and words that we’re all taught not to use because they aren’t "poetic" or specific enough– love, dark, beauty, pleasure– but apparently practically impossible to duplicate.

Which isn’t to say that Gilbert’s poems are monotonic or predictable, but that they are, whether reflecting on the profound or the absurd, consistent and still of a single, often spectacular, nature. I’m sharing just a few poems here which illustrate some of this diverse singularity…

"Going Home"

Mother was the daughter of sharecroppers.
And my father the black sheep of rich Virginia
merchants. She went barefoot until twelve.
He ran away with the circus at fourteen.
Neither one got through grammar school.
And here I am in the faculty toilet
trying to remember the dates of Emperor Vespasian.

"Trying"

Our lives are hard to know. The gardens are provisional,
and according to which moment. Whether in the burgeoning
of July or the strict beauty of January. The language
itself is mutable. The word way is equally an avenue
and a matter of being. Our way into the woods
is according to the speed. To stroll into the loveliness
or leaves blowing so fast they would shred
birds in an explosion of blood. It’s the Devil’s
mathematics that Blake spoke of, which I failed
all three times. Everyone remembers the wonderful day
in Canada when the water was perfect. I remember
the Italian afternoon when I carried Gianna on my shoulders
in the pool, her thighs straining around my head.
My falling awkwardly and getting water in my nose.
The embarrassment forty-nine years ago which I have rejoiced in.
"To war with a god-lover is not a war," Edith Hamilton write,
"It is despair." What of the terribly poor Monet
scrounging for the almost empty tubes of paint his students
left. Or Watteau dying so long near Versailles. Always
the music of the court and the taste of his beautiful
goddesses constantly going away.

"Winter in the Night Fields"

I was getting water tonight
off guard when I saw the moon
in my bucket and was tempted
by those Chinese poets
and their immaculate pain.

Tags: booklog, jack gilbert, poetry