John Yohe

Jack Gilbert may have slipped under many people’s radars. After winning the Yale Younger Poet’s prize in 1962 for the book Views of Jeopardy, he basically vanished from the poetry scene for about fifteen years, living overseas, returning with Monolithos, nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Then came The Great Fires which Knopf re-issued last year, and a Lannan Foundation Award. (See the video of him reading and being interviewed. www.lannan.org.)

Gilbert’s poems are not long. None more than a page long, and many almost sonnet-like in appearance, with uniform line length and a sense of rhythm, though not in iambic. Gilbert took his time with these and it shows. But they are not without passion. In fact, passion is seething under the surface of all these poems:

To See If Something Comes Next

There is nothing here at the top of the valley.

Sky and morning, silence and the dry smell

of heavy sunlight on the stone everywhere.

Goats occasionally, and the sound of roosters

in the bright heat where he lives with the dead

woman and purity. Trying to see if something

comes next. Wondering whether he has stalled.

Maybe, he thinks, it is like the Noh: whenever

the script says danses, whatever the actor does next

is a dance. If he stands still, he is dancing.

—page 25

Though the poems were written at least twenty years ago, they feel alive. It’s hard to do a book like this justice in a review. Better if you just had the book in your hands and opened to a random page and discovered the magic yourself….