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Collected Poems of Jack Gilbert
Gathered in this volume readers will find more than fifty years of poems by the incomparable Jack Gilbert, from his Yale Younger Poets prize-winning volume to glorious late poems, including a section of previously uncollected work.
There is no one quite like Jack Gilbert in postwar American poetry. After garnering early acclaim with Views of Jeopardy (1962), he escaped to Europe and lived apart from the literary establishment, honing his uniquely fierce, declarative style, with its surprising abundance of feeling. He reappeared in our midst with Monolithos (1982) and then went underground again until The Great Fires (1994), which was eventually followed by Refusing Heaven (2005), a prizewinning volume of surpassing joy and sorrow, and the elegiac The Dance Most of All (2009). Whether his subject is his boyhood in working-class Pittsburgh, the women he has loved throughout his life, or the bittersweet losses we all face, Gilbert is by turns subtle and he steals up on the odd moment of grace; he rises to crescendos of emotion. At every turn, he illuminates the basic joys of everyday experience.
Now, for the first time, we have all of Jack Gilbert’s work in one essential testament to a stunning career and to his place at the forefront of poetic achievement in our time.
There is no one quite like Jack Gilbert in postwar American poetry. After garnering early acclaim with Views of Jeopardy (1962), he escaped to Europe and lived apart from the literary establishment, honing his uniquely fierce, declarative style, with its surprising abundance of feeling. He reappeared in our midst with Monolithos (1982) and then went underground again until The Great Fires (1994), which was eventually followed by Refusing Heaven (2005), a prizewinning volume of surpassing joy and sorrow, and the elegiac The Dance Most of All (2009). Whether his subject is his boyhood in working-class Pittsburgh, the women he has loved throughout his life, or the bittersweet losses we all face, Gilbert is by turns subtle and he steals up on the odd moment of grace; he rises to crescendos of emotion. At every turn, he illuminates the basic joys of everyday experience.
Now, for the first time, we have all of Jack Gilbert’s work in one essential testament to a stunning career and to his place at the forefront of poetic achievement in our time.
432 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2012
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About the author
Jack Gilbert
28 books309 followersBorn and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S.'s neighborhood of East Liberty, he attended Peabody High School then worked as a door-to-door salesman, an exterminator, and a steelworker. He graduated from the University of Pittsburgh, where he and his classmate Gerald Stern developed a serious interest in poetry and writing.
His work is distinguished by simple lyricism and straightforward clarity of tone. Though his first book of poetry (Views of Jeopardy, 1962) was quickly recognized and Gilbert himself made into something of a media darling, he retreated from his earlier activity in the San Francisco poetry scene (where he participated in Jack Spicer's Poetry as Magic workshop) and moved to Europe, touring from country to country while living on a Guggenheim Fellowship. Nearly the whole of his career after the publication of his first book of poetry is marked by what he has described in interviews as a self-imposed isolation—which some have considered to be a spiritual quest to describe his alienation from mainstream American culture, and others have dismissed as little more than an extended period as a "professional houseguest" living off of wealthy American literary admirers. Subsequent books of poetry have been few and far between. He continued to write, however, and between books has occasionally contributed to The American Poetry Review, Genesis West, The Quarterly, Poetry, Ironwood, The Kenyon Review, and The New Yorker.
He was a close friend of the poet Linda Gregg who was once his student and to whom he was married for six years. He was also married to Michiko Nogami (a language instructor based in San Francisco, now deceased, about whom he has written many of his poems). He was also in a significant long term relationship with the Beat poet Laura Ulewicz during the fifties in San Francisco.
His work is distinguished by simple lyricism and straightforward clarity of tone. Though his first book of poetry (Views of Jeopardy, 1962) was quickly recognized and Gilbert himself made into something of a media darling, he retreated from his earlier activity in the San Francisco poetry scene (where he participated in Jack Spicer's Poetry as Magic workshop) and moved to Europe, touring from country to country while living on a Guggenheim Fellowship. Nearly the whole of his career after the publication of his first book of poetry is marked by what he has described in interviews as a self-imposed isolation—which some have considered to be a spiritual quest to describe his alienation from mainstream American culture, and others have dismissed as little more than an extended period as a "professional houseguest" living off of wealthy American literary admirers. Subsequent books of poetry have been few and far between. He continued to write, however, and between books has occasionally contributed to The American Poetry Review, Genesis West, The Quarterly, Poetry, Ironwood, The Kenyon Review, and The New Yorker.
He was a close friend of the poet Linda Gregg who was once his student and to whom he was married for six years. He was also married to Michiko Nogami (a language instructor based in San Francisco, now deceased, about whom he has written many of his poems). He was also in a significant long term relationship with the Beat poet Laura Ulewicz during the fifties in San Francisco.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 98 reviews
May 26, 2022
Gilbert's poetry is engaging, emotional and realistic
Of course it was a disaster.
The unbearable, dearest secret
has always been a disaster.
The danger when we try to leave.
Going over and over afterward
what we should have done
instead of what we did.
But for those short times
we seemed to be alive. Misled,
misused, lied to and cheated,
certainly. Still, for that
little while, we visited
our possible life.
-----------------------------
Our heart wanders lost in the dark woods.
Our dream wrestles in the castle of doubt.
-----------------------------
In the small towns along the river
nothing happens day after long day.
Summer weeks stalled forever,
Then a ship comes out of the mist.
Arrives on a hot fragrant night,
grandly, all lit up. Gone two days
later, leaving fury in its wake.
----------------------------
Poetry is a kind of lying,
necessarily. To profit the poet
or beauty. But also in
that truth may be told only so.
Those who, admirably, refuse
to falsify (as those who will not
risk pretensions) are excluded
from saying even so much.
Of course it was a disaster.
The unbearable, dearest secret
has always been a disaster.
The danger when we try to leave.
Going over and over afterward
what we should have done
instead of what we did.
But for those short times
we seemed to be alive. Misled,
misused, lied to and cheated,
certainly. Still, for that
little while, we visited
our possible life.
-----------------------------
Our heart wanders lost in the dark woods.
Our dream wrestles in the castle of doubt.
-----------------------------
In the small towns along the river
nothing happens day after long day.
Summer weeks stalled forever,
Then a ship comes out of the mist.
Arrives on a hot fragrant night,
grandly, all lit up. Gone two days
later, leaving fury in its wake.
----------------------------
Poetry is a kind of lying,
necessarily. To profit the poet
or beauty. But also in
that truth may be told only so.
Those who, admirably, refuse
to falsify (as those who will not
risk pretensions) are excluded
from saying even so much.
October 31, 2015
Although no relation, writer Elizabeth Gilbert has been singing poet Jack Gilbert's praises while on the tour circuit to promote her new book, Big Magic. Gilbert-she deems Gilbert-he the "poet laureate of her life".
Jack Gilbert died in 2012 at the age of 87, and I wonder what he would make of his new-found fame; he, so determined to live a life apart, under the radar, untouched by ambition.
This one of the last poems I read in Collected Poems and it joins a host of others I have tagged, for it speaks of my soul. My imperfect heart which prefers this distance from people. Prefers the half-meetings which cannot lead to intimacy. The introvert who is often disappointed by intimacy . . . a taste for solitude. A poet who knows my heart.
Yet, deep bonds are possible, though few and far between. Jack Gilbert writes often of his second wife, Michiko, who died of cancer when she was just 36 and they'd had barely ten years together. That singular devotion ripples through much of his work, which is quiet, reflective and unironically, unabashedly poetic.
Gilbert's poetry speaks often of place. His hometown, Pittsburgh, and his later years in New England, are grounded in American sensibility and industry. Yet, he wandered for years in Europe, living in Greece and Italy, as well as a span of time in Japan, and the sensuality of these cultures—the textures of food and sea, of hillsides and heat—shimmers in his work.
The poet writes of things that poets write of: grief, sex, despair, God, autumn leaves, seafood, snow. His language is is beautiful and clear, a clarion of profound emotion expressed like a stream of the clearest water.
He is a romantic
but always clear-eyed, always aware of the paradoxes in life, the ever-present shadow of suffering, chased back by the bright, white light of the wonder of being alive. I treasure this collection for the many ways he enters a thought, a theme, through the simplest of objects and precision of language. His poems are short- most a page or less-drops of water beading on skin. He allows for quiet observation, for simplicity that resonates.
This collection contains Gilbert's most famous poem, A Brief for the Defense, which makes me think of so much of his poetic contemporary, and another favorite of mine, Richard Hugo. Men born between world wars, coming of age in the beatnik years, their voices that shaped by the contours of land, isolation, sadness and freedom that no longer exists in this hyper-connected world.
A Brief For The Defense
Jack Gilbert died in 2012 at the age of 87, and I wonder what he would make of his new-found fame; he, so determined to live a life apart, under the radar, untouched by ambition.
I call it exile, or being relegated.~Spring
I call it the provinces.
And all the time it is my heart.
My imperfect heart which prefers
this distance from people. Prefers
the half-meetings which cannot lead
to intimacy. Provisional friendships
that are interrupted near the beginning.
A pleasure in not communicating.
And inside, no despair or longing.
A taste for solitude. The knowledge
that love preserves freedom in always
failing. An exile by nature. Where,
indeed, would I ever be a citizen?
This one of the last poems I read in Collected Poems and it joins a host of others I have tagged, for it speaks of my soul. My imperfect heart which prefers this distance from people. Prefers the half-meetings which cannot lead to intimacy. The introvert who is often disappointed by intimacy . . . a taste for solitude. A poet who knows my heart.
Yet, deep bonds are possible, though few and far between. Jack Gilbert writes often of his second wife, Michiko, who died of cancer when she was just 36 and they'd had barely ten years together. That singular devotion ripples through much of his work, which is quiet, reflective and unironically, unabashedly poetic.
People complain about too many moons in my poetry
Gilbert's poetry speaks often of place. His hometown, Pittsburgh, and his later years in New England, are grounded in American sensibility and industry. Yet, he wandered for years in Europe, living in Greece and Italy, as well as a span of time in Japan, and the sensuality of these cultures—the textures of food and sea, of hillsides and heat—shimmers in his work.
But it is the morningsCucumbers and longing. The busy-ness of life that causes us to miss the pleasures of cucumbers and the solace of night.
that are hard to relinquish, and music
and cucumbers. Rain on trees, empty
piazzas in small towns flooded with sun.
What we are busy with doesn’t make us
groan ah! ah! as we will for the nights
and the cucumbers.
The poet writes of things that poets write of: grief, sex, despair, God, autumn leaves, seafood, snow. His language is is beautiful and clear, a clarion of profound emotion expressed like a stream of the clearest water.
There was the scraping
sound in the piles of dead leaves on the lavish veranda.
And occasionally the bright sounds of broken glass.
All of it a blessing. The being there. Being alive then.
Like a giant bell ringing long after you can't hear it.
He is a romantic
The arches of her feet are like voices~Finding Something
of children calling in the grove of lemon trees,
where my heart is as helpless as crushed birds.
but always clear-eyed, always aware of the paradoxes in life, the ever-present shadow of suffering, chased back by the bright, white light of the wonder of being alive. I treasure this collection for the many ways he enters a thought, a theme, through the simplest of objects and precision of language. His poems are short- most a page or less-drops of water beading on skin. He allows for quiet observation, for simplicity that resonates.
This collection contains Gilbert's most famous poem, A Brief for the Defense, which makes me think of so much of his poetic contemporary, and another favorite of mine, Richard Hugo. Men born between world wars, coming of age in the beatnik years, their voices that shaped by the contours of land, isolation, sadness and freedom that no longer exists in this hyper-connected world.
A Brief For The Defense
Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.
July 30, 2012
Just finished Jack Gilbert's Collected Poems. It took me a long time to read, cover to cover in chronological order. I loved following his poetic process over the course of his life. It confirmed for me two things: 1) we have one story that we reframe again and again, and 2) if we are diligent, we mature in the craft. His early work felt more formal and framed with classical mythology. Over time, his work became more quotidian and he began to create mythology from his own life. This is a must-read for poets. The simplicity of his language will pull in non-writers as well, but be warned--this is complex stuff.
April 19, 2017
I got to know Jack Gilbert well by reading almost the entire book on the train. I like geographically-unique books because, not only do I remember the book, I remember where I read it. So Jack is blessed by my voyage through time and place.
Accessible, Gilbert favors free verse and one-stanza poems, mostly contained on one page. That fits my style of reading on two fronts. He tackles some of the bigger themes in life, including (wait for it!) death. Not to worry, I actually enjoy poems about death. I like to see what others think when they think of the other side. And trust me, they think many things.
To read three of the poems from this book, you can check out my longer discussion on the book here:
https://kencraftpoetry.wordpress.com/...
Accessible, Gilbert favors free verse and one-stanza poems, mostly contained on one page. That fits my style of reading on two fronts. He tackles some of the bigger themes in life, including (wait for it!) death. Not to worry, I actually enjoy poems about death. I like to see what others think when they think of the other side. And trust me, they think many things.
To read three of the poems from this book, you can check out my longer discussion on the book here:
https://kencraftpoetry.wordpress.com/...
October 20, 2021
To be perfectly honest, many of the poems’ meaning was lost on me. Either from references I’m not familiar with, or perhaps too specific personal information from the poet’s life, but those that hit, hit hard. And his straightforward manner is pretty, stripped down, and completely packed all at the same time. Obviously a master even to the unversed like me. :)
March 8, 2022
Please read my review here:
https://rogueliterarysociety.com/f/co...
Jack Gilbert is dead. Story from Slate can be read here:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2...
https://rogueliterarysociety.com/f/co...
Jack Gilbert is dead. Story from Slate can be read here:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2...
December 29, 2012
I like Jack Gilbert's poetry so much that I feel as if my life has been enriched by it, by my discovery of him a few years ago. This volume, Collected Poems, presents his life's work. That life is all here: the travel and exotic locales lived in, everyday scenes evoking ideas and providing epiphanies, those ideas grappled with and sorted out, the women he loved, especially Linda and Michiko. In his constant, understated language which becomes as rhythmic as sunrises and as profoundly filled with truth as the wind brushing the Greek hills he loves so much, he can be as elegiac about Michiko as he can be astonished by Linda bathing. Yet as he claims this world as his, as he describes it in language tinged with reverence and modest acceptance, he can still see the possibility of Eurydice in the Sacramento Valley and identify with Don Giovanni's need of the sexual knowledge of women. All this wonderful poetry lies in layers waiting for eagerly prospecting readers to mine it, each poem a new shaft.
March 8, 2016
It wouldn't be much of a stretch to say that Jack Gilbert is easily in my top five poets. He's one of those folks like Wallace Stevens or April Bernard, impossible to classify or even compare to anyone else, especially structurally. I know dick about poetic form (consciously) so I tend to focus on theme and heart for ideas of structure can easily devolve into stupid, self-aggrandizing justifications for being a shitty (fill in the blank with a type of artist).
More important is what does the poem mean? How does it make you feel? Gilbert's poems make you feel lonely, empty, and replete all at once. He talks about death, love, and various combinations of both involving a frenetic eroticism at times that's borderline religious mania. He's part of a strange season, again, one that is difficult to describe but one which when you try to describe it, those in the know nod uncomfortably, agree, and change the subject. And this is why I love his poems.
More important is what does the poem mean? How does it make you feel? Gilbert's poems make you feel lonely, empty, and replete all at once. He talks about death, love, and various combinations of both involving a frenetic eroticism at times that's borderline religious mania. He's part of a strange season, again, one that is difficult to describe but one which when you try to describe it, those in the know nod uncomfortably, agree, and change the subject. And this is why I love his poems.
September 21, 2014
One of the best American poets of the last century. He has clean line, edgy line, dark, very dark and gloomy line, cutting line, clear line, understandable line, psychologically loaded line, nostalgic line, manly line, and most of all poetic line. An exclusive collection of poems. A must read!
September 6, 2023
Right up my alley. I devoured this thick book of poems, Jack Gilbert’s unapologetic life’s work, which is mostly about the three women he loved and lost (Gianna, Linda, Michiko), places he lived, and blips of beautiful rising consciousness. I expect I will return to him many times in the years to come.
Here’s one great one from the very many in this book, which I find representative of his general style:
Here’s one great one from the very many in this book, which I find representative of his general style:
Not the Happiness but the Consequence of Happiness
He wakes up in the silence of the winter woods,
the silence of birds not singing, knowing he will
not hear his voice all day. He remembers what
the brown owl sounded like while he was sleeping.
The man wakes in the frigid morning thinking
about women. Not with desire so much as with a sense
of what is not. The January silence is the sound
of his feet in the snow, a squirrel scolding,
or the scraping calls of a single blue jay.
Something of him dances there, apart and gravely mute.
Many days in the woods he wonders what it is
that he has so long hunted down. We go hand
in hand, he thinks, into the dark pleasure,
but we are rewarded alone, just as we are married
into aloneness. He walks the paths doing the strange
mathematics of the brain, multiplying the spirit.
He thinks of caressing her feet as she kept dying.
For the last four hours, watching her gradually stop
as the hospital slept. Remembers the stunning
coldness of her head when he kissed her just after.
There is light or more light, darkness and less darkness.
It is, he decides, a quality without definition.
How strange to discover that one lives with the heart
as one lives with a wife. Even after many years,
nobody knows what she is like. The heart has
a life of its own. It gets free of us, escapes,
is ambitiously unfaithful. Dies out unaccountably
after eight years, blooms unnecessarily and too late.
Like the arbitrary silence in the white woods,
leaving tracks in the snow he cannot recognize.
May 28, 2016
What we are given is taken away,
but we manage to keep it secretly.
We lose everything, but make harvest
of the consequence it was to us. Memory
builds this kingdom from the fragments
and approximation. We are gleaners who fill
the barn for the winter that comes on.
*
That is what the Odyssey means.
Love can leave you nowhere […]
The pregnant heart
is driven to hopes that are the wrong
size for this world.
*
We learn to live without passion.
To be reasonable. We go hungry
amid the giant granaries
this world is. We store up plenty
for when we are old and mild.
It is our strength that deprives us.
*
I keep trying to feel who I was,
and cannot.
but we manage to keep it secretly.
We lose everything, but make harvest
of the consequence it was to us. Memory
builds this kingdom from the fragments
and approximation. We are gleaners who fill
the barn for the winter that comes on.
*
That is what the Odyssey means.
Love can leave you nowhere […]
The pregnant heart
is driven to hopes that are the wrong
size for this world.
*
We learn to live without passion.
To be reasonable. We go hungry
amid the giant granaries
this world is. We store up plenty
for when we are old and mild.
It is our strength that deprives us.
*
I keep trying to feel who I was,
and cannot.
June 4, 2025
It is one of the most beautiful books I have ever read. Reading it was a long and intense emotional voyage, side by side with Gilbert, he growing constantly on me. He still is. And I won't abandon him from now on. His poetry is shaped as a life-long companion. Do yourself a favor and read it. Read it slowly.
September 10, 2023
Jack Gilbert was one of the first poets I read in college that really fired me up about poetry (we read The Great Fires in my senior seminar: pun intended, I guess). "The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart" is still one of my favorite poems of all time. But reading the collected works makes you see that Gilbert was a sad dude obsessed with women and harping on late-life loneliness and his regrets. And Prospero. Furthermore, his poetry has the kind of elusiveness that I don't find as intriguing as I did years ago. Interesting how our relationship to art changes over time.
December 13, 2012
This is my first exposure to Gilbert. He's not, I think, my cup of tea. There were several poems I liked, but only one (Rain) I loved. I did enjoy the way this book took me through his life's work, though. And some of his imagery was terrific. There was one poem about old men going back to the farm of their youth that really resonated with me. I'm glad I read this book, but it's not one I need on my shelf.
May 30, 2017
Spare but unsparing in their reflections on love and loss and memory, but also on light and dark and sun and moon and stars and trees and seas, Jack Gilbert's poems wistfully, painfully, and painstakingly show how "astonishing it is that language can almost mean and frightening that it does not quite," poems that are themselves quietly astonishing, meaningful, and sometimes frightening.
January 9, 2013
Anyone who creates a lifetime's worth of poetry, with little exception, deserves five stars. Gilbert is no exception. A great work.
February 8, 2015
Uuuuggggghhhh.
November 12, 2024
the ones i liked the most were in the prior books i already read those were ⭐️⭐️⭐️ ! no thinking nodes 🪺
December 14, 2025
I've been reading Gilbert for years and years. His unflinching embrace of difficulty in love and loss is unlike any other poets', and I always get something new when I go back to these poems. His talents are broad: vivid images, depth of emotion, classical allusions, symbolist devices, Gilbert works all of these into his work which is also sparse, and precise, and devastatingly direct. Among our lesser heralded poets of desire, I can think of little which I love as much as his poetry.
My favourites change always, but there is of course a core. Some - "Ovid in Love" - are complex and draw the reader in. Others are purpose built, among which is "Rain" and I can think of few better capable to convey the profundity of loss:
Lovely, that confrontation. Like a sigh escaping the body, a crack in the world. But, for a different tack, here is "Ovid in Tears" which I love for its minatory brilliance, its wild and imagistic philosophy of exclusion and desire spun from despair and confusion:
Of course, the most popular today could be "Failing and Flying" which is the characteristic stubborn mode of feeling that Gilbert often asserts, where confidence overturns romantic convention to find a truth of love where others could offer a sanitized or anesthetized conclusion, where a gimlet eye bores into the misapprehensions of the present to see a realization of the heart:
My favourites change always, but there is of course a core. Some - "Ovid in Love" - are complex and draw the reader in. Others are purpose built, among which is "Rain" and I can think of few better capable to convey the profundity of loss:
Suddenly this defeat.
This rain.
The blues gone gray
and yellow
a terrible amber.
In the cold streets
your warm body.
In whatever room
your warm body.
Among all the people
your absence.
The people who are always
not you.
I have been easy with trees
too long.
Too familiar with mountains.
Joy has been a habit.
Now
suddenly
this rain.
Lovely, that confrontation. Like a sigh escaping the body, a crack in the world. But, for a different tack, here is "Ovid in Tears" which I love for its minatory brilliance, its wild and imagistic philosophy of exclusion and desire spun from despair and confusion:
Love is like a garden in the heart, he said.
They asked him what he meant by garden.
He explained about gardens. “In the cities,”
he said, “there are places walled off where color
and decorum are magnified into a civilization.
Like a beautiful woman,” he said. How like
a woman, they asked. He remembered their wives
and said garden was just a figure of speech,
then called for drinks all around. Two rounds
later he was crying. Talking about how Charlemagne
couldn’t read but still made a world. About Hagia
Sophia and putting a round dome on a square
base after nine hundred years of failure.
The hand holding him slipped and he fell.
“White stone in the white sunlight,” he said
as they picked him up. “Not the great fires
built on the edge of the world.” His voice grew
fainter as they carried him away. “Both the melody
and the symphony. The imperfect dancing
in the beautiful dance. The dance most of all.”
Of course, the most popular today could be "Failing and Flying" which is the characteristic stubborn mode of feeling that Gilbert often asserts, where confidence overturns romantic convention to find a truth of love where others could offer a sanitized or anesthetized conclusion, where a gimlet eye bores into the misapprehensions of the present to see a realization of the heart:
Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.Perhaps I will leave it there.
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.
April 14, 2025
One of the great American poets, self described as a serious romantic. This collection meanders across the globe.
January 12, 2013
ack Gilbert’s “mother was the daughter of sharecroppers,” his “father the black sheep of rich Virginia merchants.” Their son became the merchant of pure being, in poems he sold reluctantly, letting 20 years pass between volumes.
Most of Jack’s poems are about women and ordinary things experienced in many countries and cities, and his attitudes and convictions concerning sex and poetry.
“Don Giovanni on His Way to Hell,” in his first book, Views of Jeopardy, in the Yale Series of Younger Poets,” declares, in Giovanni’s voice, Jack’s attitude toward women. “How could they think women a recreation?/ Or the repetition of bodies of steady interest?... /I would not have lost so much for recreation.” Giovanni himself could have written Jack’s line: “The truth is goddesses are lousy in bed.”
In “Cherishing What Isn’t,” Jack remembers. “Ah, you three women whom I have loved in this / long life, along with a few others.” They, the music, the dancing most of all, “will end with my ending.”
Gianna was the love of his life. Distancing himself from himself by using “he,” Jack remembers “Gianna’s virgin body helplessly in love./ The young man wild with romance and appetite./Wondering whether he would ruin her by mistake.”
Linda Gregg, now a famous poet, has been his love and his friend for half a century.
He is sometimes reluctant to make what matters “part of literature”—“Linda getting up from a chair” in Monolithos on the island of Rhodes. Linda ends her poem “Together in Greece,” “I went to him with that singing in me.” Jack laments the end of their love: “the song, suddenly, /has gone out/of me.”
Repotting his late Japanese wife’s avocado plant, Jack discovers a single strand of her hair. Michiko became “a dead woman filling the whole world.”
In life and in poetry, Jack has sought value in everything; he has aspired to make every moment matter. About a woman who so indifferently offers her naked body to men that “she is invisible under the glare of her nudity,” Jack wonders, “Is there a danger she/might feel that nothing significant happened?”
Jack moved among the Beats in San Francisco, knew them all, but he was not of them. He ends “The Abnormal Is Not Courage” convinced that what matters, what is of value, fundamentally, “is the normal excellence, of long accomplishment.”
Never into drugs or alcohol, Jack has always been a man of intense, unaffected curiosity about people, places, things, and ideas. “If we are always good does God lose track/of us?” But unable to engage in chitchat, Jack has never been drawn to hanging out with poets.
With the ideal face and voice of the poet, a man of no fixed abode, of few possessions, when he came to visit you, he came by bus, greeted you carrying only a battered, fat briefcase. Happily always on the move, he could say of himself in Pittsburgh, where he was born, in Italy, where he fell out of a tree into near death, in San Francisco, New York, Paris, London, Greece, Sweden, “I wake to freshness. And do reverence.”
Jack used to eat his lunch in a cemetery beside a tree that grew out of a grave. “I liked to think of someone eating what was left of my heart and spirit as I lay in the dark earth translating into fruit.” All his life Jack chose the solitary life moving around the world, purely living, loving, writing. In old age, living in a room in New England, he writes, “I say grace over everything.” Now he lives in California again, Linda watching over him again. An early poem sums up Jack’s view of his life, still true at 87. “This I have done with my life, and am content./ I wish I could tell you how it is in that dark/Standing in the huge singing and the alien world.”
Most of Jack’s poems are about women and ordinary things experienced in many countries and cities, and his attitudes and convictions concerning sex and poetry.
“Don Giovanni on His Way to Hell,” in his first book, Views of Jeopardy, in the Yale Series of Younger Poets,” declares, in Giovanni’s voice, Jack’s attitude toward women. “How could they think women a recreation?/ Or the repetition of bodies of steady interest?... /I would not have lost so much for recreation.” Giovanni himself could have written Jack’s line: “The truth is goddesses are lousy in bed.”
In “Cherishing What Isn’t,” Jack remembers. “Ah, you three women whom I have loved in this / long life, along with a few others.” They, the music, the dancing most of all, “will end with my ending.”
Gianna was the love of his life. Distancing himself from himself by using “he,” Jack remembers “Gianna’s virgin body helplessly in love./ The young man wild with romance and appetite./Wondering whether he would ruin her by mistake.”
Linda Gregg, now a famous poet, has been his love and his friend for half a century.
He is sometimes reluctant to make what matters “part of literature”—“Linda getting up from a chair” in Monolithos on the island of Rhodes. Linda ends her poem “Together in Greece,” “I went to him with that singing in me.” Jack laments the end of their love: “the song, suddenly, /has gone out/of me.”
Repotting his late Japanese wife’s avocado plant, Jack discovers a single strand of her hair. Michiko became “a dead woman filling the whole world.”
In life and in poetry, Jack has sought value in everything; he has aspired to make every moment matter. About a woman who so indifferently offers her naked body to men that “she is invisible under the glare of her nudity,” Jack wonders, “Is there a danger she/might feel that nothing significant happened?”
Jack moved among the Beats in San Francisco, knew them all, but he was not of them. He ends “The Abnormal Is Not Courage” convinced that what matters, what is of value, fundamentally, “is the normal excellence, of long accomplishment.”
Never into drugs or alcohol, Jack has always been a man of intense, unaffected curiosity about people, places, things, and ideas. “If we are always good does God lose track/of us?” But unable to engage in chitchat, Jack has never been drawn to hanging out with poets.
With the ideal face and voice of the poet, a man of no fixed abode, of few possessions, when he came to visit you, he came by bus, greeted you carrying only a battered, fat briefcase. Happily always on the move, he could say of himself in Pittsburgh, where he was born, in Italy, where he fell out of a tree into near death, in San Francisco, New York, Paris, London, Greece, Sweden, “I wake to freshness. And do reverence.”
Jack used to eat his lunch in a cemetery beside a tree that grew out of a grave. “I liked to think of someone eating what was left of my heart and spirit as I lay in the dark earth translating into fruit.” All his life Jack chose the solitary life moving around the world, purely living, loving, writing. In old age, living in a room in New England, he writes, “I say grace over everything.” Now he lives in California again, Linda watching over him again. An early poem sums up Jack’s view of his life, still true at 87. “This I have done with my life, and am content./ I wish I could tell you how it is in that dark/Standing in the huge singing and the alien world.”
February 25, 2015
Full disclosure: I haven't read much poetry, and I certainly did not read this critically, with intent to analyze. My history with poetry lies largely in the classroom when I was assigned Robert Frost or John Donne for homework. Beyond that, I've read some Poe, but this collection is the only significant amount of poetry that I've read of my own volition. I haven't finished, but am about halfway through.
My older brother gave me this book for Christmas two years ago. Later that day, when relatives came over and I felt suffocated from socializing, I retreated to a trail in the woods a couple miles from my house, and began to read these poems aloud. In retrospect, walking among the skeletons of trees and surrounded by dirty, icy snow was the perfect place to read these poems. Gilbert's words present a profound melancholy, laced with mystery. He talks of the present and future through memories, comparing the droll “now” to the sadistically cathartic “then”. Snatches of Grecian beaches and luxuriant ex-lovers drag guilt and wistfulness through these poems, haunting the reader as we mourn those glory days. Yet, some of his poems move through this reminiscing to redemption. Here’s an example:
“Married:
I came back from the funeral and crawled
around the apartment, crying hard,
searching for my wife’s hair.
For two months got them from the drain,
from the vacuum cleaner, under the refrigerator,
and off the clothes in the closet.
But after other Japanese women came,
there was no way to be sure which were
hers, and I stopped. A year later,
repotting Michiko’s avocado, I find
a long black hair tangled in the dirt.”
Perhaps it’s just me, someone who does find beauty in those dark, dreary, wet days between a white winter and a crisp autumn, but Gilbert offers something worthwhile, maybe even pleasurable. He articulates what gets washed out in the slog of depression and mourning, diving into the crannies of (what many think of as) empty space, and comes up with a creature so pitiful and tragic that you should turn away. But, when you look into the eye of that trembling thing (I picture it as a Cyclopean rodent, for some reason)Gilbert holds by the tail, that he has placed on the table between you two in that empty space, you comprehend, you intimately know, this embodiment of tragedy. While this contact is valuable, it can be dangerous. I rarely read more than five or six poems in a row (or in a week) because this world that Gilbert paints is one of loss and pain and probably isn’t healthy to dwell upon (at least not for me, someone prone to melancholy). So take what this collection can offer, because it offers much, but do so warily and lay down a thread when you enter, so you may found your way out of the labyrinth.
My older brother gave me this book for Christmas two years ago. Later that day, when relatives came over and I felt suffocated from socializing, I retreated to a trail in the woods a couple miles from my house, and began to read these poems aloud. In retrospect, walking among the skeletons of trees and surrounded by dirty, icy snow was the perfect place to read these poems. Gilbert's words present a profound melancholy, laced with mystery. He talks of the present and future through memories, comparing the droll “now” to the sadistically cathartic “then”. Snatches of Grecian beaches and luxuriant ex-lovers drag guilt and wistfulness through these poems, haunting the reader as we mourn those glory days. Yet, some of his poems move through this reminiscing to redemption. Here’s an example:
“Married:
I came back from the funeral and crawled
around the apartment, crying hard,
searching for my wife’s hair.
For two months got them from the drain,
from the vacuum cleaner, under the refrigerator,
and off the clothes in the closet.
But after other Japanese women came,
there was no way to be sure which were
hers, and I stopped. A year later,
repotting Michiko’s avocado, I find
a long black hair tangled in the dirt.”
Perhaps it’s just me, someone who does find beauty in those dark, dreary, wet days between a white winter and a crisp autumn, but Gilbert offers something worthwhile, maybe even pleasurable. He articulates what gets washed out in the slog of depression and mourning, diving into the crannies of (what many think of as) empty space, and comes up with a creature so pitiful and tragic that you should turn away. But, when you look into the eye of that trembling thing (I picture it as a Cyclopean rodent, for some reason)Gilbert holds by the tail, that he has placed on the table between you two in that empty space, you comprehend, you intimately know, this embodiment of tragedy. While this contact is valuable, it can be dangerous. I rarely read more than five or six poems in a row (or in a week) because this world that Gilbert paints is one of loss and pain and probably isn’t healthy to dwell upon (at least not for me, someone prone to melancholy). So take what this collection can offer, because it offers much, but do so warily and lay down a thread when you enter, so you may found your way out of the labyrinth.
December 5, 2012
Jarrell's dictum is that a great lyric poet writes a half-dozen great poems in his life. Gilbert clearly qualifies as one of the great American poets. The heart of his achievement is in Monolithos (1982) and Great Fires (1994), where the ratio of first-rate poems to lesser poems is quite high. His first volume, a Yale Series volume, is not as good, which is to be expected, and the two late volumes are lesser too, not because Gilbert's manner and voice have changed but rather because the writing has become less about the embodiment of emotion and more about the statement of emotion. The later poems are more like small essays than the powerful poems of the earlier decades. Having Gilbert's work all in one location like this also makes it easier to "see" Gilbert in his time. He pursued his own path, but he is still clearly an American poet of the 20th century. Most collections of poetry contain a couple of pages, at best, of first-rate work. This volume has dozens.
March 28, 2013
Lance Cleland (Editorial Assistant, Tin House Magazine): With his recent passing, I suppose Jack Gilbert’s collected work might seem like a sentimental pick. I’m alright with that. As a poet, Gilbert was never afraid to get sentimental. He knew melancholy could find you in the cereal aisle and rather than trying to turn that into something ironic (something many of his contemporaries do at an alarming rate), he embraced the ways emotion run our lives. I find this to be both brave and comforting. There is a direct nature to almost every line he writes, which forces you to react immediately to the work. His heart is skidding and so your heart is skidding. There is little unwrapping to be done here. Which is not to say that Gilbert’s work does not stay with you, that you will not linger over his poems from morning coffee to your nightcap. It just that his words burrow quickly. Collectively, they narrate a life lived and one that is just beginning.
April 5, 2012
While, other than "Michiko Dead" and a smattering of his other poems, nothing lives up to "Monolithos" and his previously uncollected poems literally add nothing to his oeuvre, this collection is still worth the price, if only for the out-of-print "Monolithos" (which you'll be lucky to find even used for less than $50). Jack's greatest strength and greatest weakness are, by and large, one: his frequent overtness, simplicity, and deeply personal feelings. When deftly combined with concept/simile/extended metaphor/subtlety, it churns out universally appealing/easily understood work (e.g. "Michiko Dead," "In Dispraise of Poetry," "Hunger," etc.). But too often, it veers into well-written but narcissistic blathering. These three stars, then, are mostly for "Monolithos."
January 18, 2013
Very powerful personal poetry. His intellect just set me back a step, emotion, images, feelings and places are powerfully placed and felt.
Besides, he is a "yinzer" and we all have to stick together. My God, being admitted to the University of Pittsburgh due to a clerical error just seems so typical of Pittsburgh (smaller town values in a good size metro area). Great personal story as well as poetry.
Besides, he is a "yinzer" and we all have to stick together. My God, being admitted to the University of Pittsburgh due to a clerical error just seems so typical of Pittsburgh (smaller town values in a good size metro area). Great personal story as well as poetry.
May 24, 2015
i'd seen a few of his poems around before and liked them: the michiko poems & "the abandoned valley," which i think most people have read somewhere or other before but:
Can you understand being alone so long
you would go out in the middle of the night
and put a bucket into the well
so you could feel something down there
tug at the other end of the rope?
taken all together this is basically an autobiography. a really good one.
Can you understand being alone so long
you would go out in the middle of the night
and put a bucket into the well
so you could feel something down there
tug at the other end of the rope?
taken all together this is basically an autobiography. a really good one.
February 11, 2013
I can't imagine reading Gilbert's books separately. There is a long, tragic, narrative that weaves through all five of the books collected here, a line that broken would unravel. I feel, in some ways, as though if Gilbert had Whitmaned Views of Jeopardy, building the collection upon itself, this text would be his Leaves of Grass; the whole better than the parts.
August 26, 2013
The most brilliant and accessible poetry I have read in years. Belongs on an easy-to-reach shelf with other life-changers like Allen Ginsburg and Gary Snyder, though the poetry itself is quite different.
May 22, 2014
Most of Jack's poems grab me and won't let go. Some don't, but are beautifully written, and I know must mean something to someone.
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