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The poet Yeats, unlike most of his predecessors throughout history, grew
and matured as he aged. While--on the one hand--his poetry changed
dramatically in manner, from an often dreamlike and gauzy Romanticism to
a sharply observed Modernism, his sources showed on the other hand a
remarkable tenacity--mythology, love and lust, time versus eternity. Of
the poets to follow Yeats, perhaps no one has exhibited the Yeatsian
upward curve as clearly as Jack Gilbert. Of course it is true that
Gilbert has given us far fewer books by which to judge--3 as of his 68th
birthday (4 if you count the alternate Views of Jeopardy contained
within Monolithos)--but it is equally true that each book betters the
previous one. That Gilbert could accomplish this while remaining
virtually the same poet, showing none of the apparent shifts Yeats made,
is perhaps even more remarkable. Deepening his skill within a mode
characteristic of his work from the start, Gilbert has become, as it
were, more and more himself as he has improved that self.
 The comparison to Yeats is applicable for another reason than quality--
the equal attention paid by these two aging men to human sexuality. Time
and again in The Great Fires, which could well be Gilbert's last
collection, he makes it clear that the years have not lessened his sexual
desire. In "The Container for the Thing Contained," for example, he
catalogs the parts of his lover's body which still "surprise" him, noting
particularly ( and uncommonly) the bones. He compares himself to Picasso,
"grotesque," yet painting the female nude after sixty long years, and
wonders, "What could there be in it still / to find?" The theme here is
not especially unusual, but Gilbert redeems the convention by his almost
clinical attention, his resistance to Romanticism, through most of the
poem. Then he falters, as he often does, and tells us in far too obvious
a manner that Picasso "was happy even then to get / close to the distant,
distant intermittency."
A better poem, one that avoids unnecessary explication, is the extended
metaphor "Older Women," which I will quote in its entirety:
Each farmer on the island conceals
his hive far up on the mountain,
knowing it will otherwise be plundered.
When they die, or can no longer make
the hard climb, the lost combs year
after year grow heavier with honey.
And the sweetness has more and more
acutely the taste of that wilderness.
This lyric is not only worthy of Archilochos, but could easily have been
written by him, unburdened as it is by specifications of historic era.
Gilbert's restraint is at its more notable here, resisting as he does all
impulses to overplay his images and go for the easy payoff. All of the
poem's weight--its notations of male lust and impotence and of female
longing and loneliness, even the erotic delicacy of the "lost combs"--
exists in the connection the naturalistic description has to the poem's
title, and the charge delivered to the reader as he considers the
continually heavier hives in the context of that title not only provokes
eroticism in its actual homeland, the imagination, but also applies it
objectively to a less than likely receptor, at least in our culture, the
older woman. If we tie poem and title even more tightly and imagine the
older women of the title to be precisely the old farmers' wives the
metaphor suggests, the eroticism becomes even more unlikely and,
therefore, more powerful.
Other lusty poems include the comic "Lovers" ( also structured as an
extended metaphor), the less successful but still moving "Infidelity" and
"Music Is the Memory of What Never Happened," as well as the almost
equally unusual "Theoretical Lives." Gilbert begins this last in an
investigation of ancient sculpture:
All that remains from the work of Skopas
are the feet. Sometimes not even that.
Sometimes only irregularities on the plinth
that may indicate how the figure stood.
There is nothing figurative about this introduction, but readers in this
post-modern age can be relied upon to construct their own metaphors,
especially as they have been tipped off by the dreadfully vague, but
insistent, title. Gilbert goes on to tell us how the "German professors"
( odd detail, no?) extrapolate from the feet and plinths what the statues
themselves must have been like and even "how good." Then the poem
stumbles, as "Older Women" does not, with too easy a "lesson." This sort
of hypothesizing, we are told, is
what we do with our lives, guessing whether
the woman was truly happy when it rained
and if her father was really the ambassador.
Huh? The plummet these lines mark from the preceding almost destroys the
final line as well, which--on its own--would have worked perfectly
well: "Whether she was passionate or just wanted to please." Not that I
mean to suggest that this is a fabulous bit of language, but rather that
if it had been left alone, immediately following the professors'
arguments, then the ambiguity as to whether we are to understand that the
professors also argued about the statue's passion or whether Gilbert is
leaping from the abstracted argument to his attempt to "know" his lovers
truly is an acceptably satisfactory place for the poem to land.
Another interesting characteristic of The Great Fires--and again
suggestive of links to Yeat's obsessions with cosmic philosophy--is the
number of poems which refer to Gilbert's relationship with, or attempts
to understand, "the Lord." The best of these is also the lightest and
slightest, confident enough to attempt less and imply more. "The Lord
Sits with Me out in Front" begins with Gilbert and God watching the
sunset and trying "to decide whether I am lonely." The homely nature of
the quest is supported by Gilbert's mundane evidence--waking in the
middle of the night, thinking about "what the man did to the daughter of
Louise," noting the moonlessness of the night. The second example he
gives, an instance of man's inhumanity to man, at first reading seems
careless--why does Gilbert leave the mention so unspecific? But
reconsideration points out the correctness of using the "dull" phrase
"what the man did": for one thing, Gilbert is talking to God who
presumably knows what the man did; furthermore, by leaving the phrase
virtually blank Gilbert makes the poem a mirror of its reader, who will
supply his own concrete image. After Gilbert's inventory ( or litany, if
you prefer), God suggests a couple of explanations for Gilbert's mood--
his age, his poverty--but Gilbert shrugs the issue off. As darkness
falls they listen to a cassette of Brahms. "The tape finishes again /
and we sit on. Unable to find words." Words for what? Not, surely, for
Gilbert's already dismissed dilemma. Words then for the fact of sunset
or the ensuing darkness? Words for the emotions they provoke? Words
about Brahms? We are not told: the poem's conclusion is left to us, as
is (I imagine Gilbert saying) our own conversation with God.
This poem links God to sexuality in the same way the far less
successful, though more ambitious, "I Imagine the Gods" does. Here
Gilbert depicts himself being offered three wishes and immediately
ruminating upon past physical pleasures--a feast he was fortunate to
attend at a time he was quite poor, a sexual opportunity he passed up in
youthful fear. The gods beg him to consider fame or wisdom, but Gilbert
insists on the everydayness of living life. Though the thought and
rhetoric fail to live up to the snare of the premise, the poem is
nonetheless thematically pure Gilbert: the "big" concepts--God, love,
death--are to be accessed only via the minutiae of regular life. It is
not perhaps surprising that when Gilbert fails, he often does so by
reaching beyond his implied philosophical stance, by trying too blatantly
to reveal the universal within the particular and the grand within the
small, rather than by simply creating the small and the particular with
such care that its universality cannot be denied--the procedure followed
so successfully with "Older Women."
If God and love occur throughout The Great Fires, so too does death,
specifically the death of Gilbert's love Michiko in the early '80's.
"Michiko Dead," the perfect poem of this grouping, functions much as
"Older Women" does, though here Gilbert states the comparison directly as
an extended simile. The poem begins "He manages", and the reader knows
from the title exactly what he is managing. "He manages like somebody
carrying a box / that is too heavy. . . ." Most readers will convert the
box into a coffin as they read, even though any coffin's but an infant's
is too large to fit the simile, but Gilbert refrains. As he advances the
simile he never looks up from it, never lets go of its concreteness, and
thus never loses his grip on the rhetoric. The descriptive narration is
exact: the man first has his arms underneath the box, then as they tire
he "moves the hands forward / hooking them on the corners, pulling the
weight against / his chest." Gilbert could have, emotionally and
inaccurately, pulled the weight against his heart--but he does not.
Next he moves his thumbs, shifting the strain to different muscles. Then
he "carries it on his shoulder." Then, by the time the uplifted arm is
numb, he "can hold it underneath again, so that / he can go without ever
putting the box down." Some might argue that the last line is too
emphatic, but in fact it is the logical conclusion of a poem structured
as a problem in applied science, and therefore the metaphoric weight of
the never-surrendered box is wholly appropriate. Gilbert has again
chosen a careful presentation of "facts" to convey an overpowering
emotional experience, and his success here arises not simply from a
correctly chosen simile but also from his stubborn refusal to let it get
out of hand. Couple this poem with "Older Women" and you have a virtual
workshop in how to create art rather than sociology, worth a dozen MFA
programs.
There are, to be sure, poems here which do not belong in these three
categories. "Haunted Importantly", with its portentous title, might be
about God, love or death, or all three, or none. It is built out of an
experience with "Linda," presumably poet Linda Gregg, in which they both
hear, putting their ears to a church door, "spirits singing inside"--not
inside the church, you understand, inside the door. Despite the weak,
rather New-Age-y beginning, the poem finds, in the sixth line, its solid
core--
In Madrid, he heard a bell begin somewhere
in the night rain. Worked his way through
the tangle of alleys, the sound deeper and more
powerful as he got closer. Short of the plaza,
it filled all of him and he turned back. No need,
he thought, to see the bell. It was not the bell
he was trying to find. . . .
These are concise, evocative lines, pinning down a singular experience
that might be referred to as transcendent, but which Gilbert refuses to
name as such until he loses his grip. "It was not the bell / he was
trying to find, but the angel lost / in our bodies. The music that
thinking is." Here the poem loops back to its over-the-top introduction
and insults the reader. But Gilbert quickly recovers and ends the poem
on solid ground: "He wanted to know what he heard, not to get closer."
It is, at first glance, an uncharacteristic ending for Gilbert, rooted in
his particularity--"what he heard"--but renunciatory in a manner not
common to him. Normally Gilbert wants "to get closer" to whatever the
experience is. Then the context catches up to us: it is not a "closer"
experience Gilbert is shying away from, but the mistaken thought that
physical closeness to an object can in any way explain or deepen the
emotional intensity that resides within the individual, and not in the
world that provokes the individual's response.
The Great Fires is full also of vivid vignettes, many of them flawed,
but still powerful. I recommend "Trying to Have Something Left Over,"
"Explicating the Twilight," "Recovering Amid the Ruins," "To See if
Something Comes Next," "Betrothed," "Michiko Nogami (1946-1982)" and
"Ghosts." Throughout the book, including in the poems that fail, readers
will find Gilbert's attention to the "things of this world," to things
and people which have passed away, to things which continue. If Louis
Simpson is our greatest living explicator of the way people live in
society, live together, then Gilbert is the proponent of the individual
as individual. In the work of these two, I suggest, the reader will find
the only legitimately grand old men still writing poetry in this country.
There are younger poets who may--at some point--exceed the
accomplishments of these two ( the reader is advised to seek out the work
of M Sarki, for example), but of the generation born between the two
world wars, Gilbert and Simpson are the two who matter most, no matter
what the prize committees and anthologists may think.
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