Elephants

by David Gilbert

An extraordinary sequence that puts pressure on language to unsettle expectations and raise vital questions. "This collection mingles the real and a surrealism of the understated Magritte kind to insinuate, with carefully modulated images and rhythms, a subtle disquiet that tests the boundaries of mental health and 'normal' apprehension." Ian Gregson Extract 'The World Is Full of Toilets To Cry In' Old smelly ones of course, uninspected, with cracked floor tiles, damp inglorious seats and broken locks, where one tap gushes forever hot and the dryer doesn't work, even if you bang it several times. And where you're not so poorly as to fail to notice the plethora of metaphors. I can feel more at home in posh ones, conference centres, government agencies and four star hotels (you can sometimes sneak in if you're desperate) where Mozart streams in from unidentifiable wall speakers and the soap and incense sticks, in your justifiable fury, are easily nicked.

36 pages, Paperback

Published February 5, 2018

About the author

David Gilbert is the author of the story collection Remote Feed and the novel The Normals. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, GQ, and Bomb. He lives in New York with his wife and three children.

Reviews

[Paul Jenkins · Rating 5 out of 5]

Published by Cinnamon Press Elephants (Fragile) is a beautiful collection of 24 well-crafted and moving poems. Many have an autobiographical theme including a number which draw on the poet’s lived experience of mental illness.

I have been familiar for some time with David’s poetry which he shares regularly on social media, but this is the first collection I have read. He has a lovely style of writing which combines the deep and the banal and the sublime and the ordinary in a juxtaposition which powerfully speaks of the real world, especially the one experienced by people in distress.

For a number of reasons, it is the poems about mental illness which I most appreciated. The poems convey a searching honesty about the poet’s experiences, but the descriptions are given a poetic frame which both contains them but also makes them more impactful.

For instance, in the poem The Jab the poet describes the arrival of a crisis team:

Midnight’s rush
Of telephone calls
Rose wailing and wolf-like
Four men arrived
Serious and muscular
The quiet jab came

When I worked in mental health I was often struck by the power of art, whether painting poetry or some other form to make the dreadful experiences of living with mental illness more accessible and understandable. Such work does not come without cost but it an immensely important channel for promoting better understanding. Elephants (Fragile) epitomises this phenomenon. It is well worth reading by those who wish to know more about that subject or by those who just enjoy excellent poetry.