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An Ark of Sorts
This delicately shaped series of poems chronicles a mother's days of grief following the death of a child. The poems fathom her inner dialogue as she tries both to comfort her family, and to escape from the reality of tragedy.
- GenresPoetry
48 pages, Paperback
First published May 15, 1998
4 people want to read
About the author
Celia Gilbert
12 books1 followerLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
See this thread for more information.
Celia Gilbert is the author of several books of poetry, including Bonfire (Alice James Books) and Queen of Darkness (Viking Press). Her poetry has appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, The New Yorker, Southwest, and Grand Street. She is the winner of a Discovery Award and a Pushcart Prize IX. The Poetry Society of America awarded her both an Emily Dickinson Prize and a Consuelo Ford Award, and her work has been frequently anthologized. Celia Gilbert grew up in Washington D.C. She received a B.A. from Smith College and an M.A. from Boston University and was Poetry and Fiction Editor of The Boston Phoenix. After living abroad in England and France, she now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
See this thread for more information.
Celia Gilbert is the author of several books of poetry, including Bonfire (Alice James Books) and Queen of Darkness (Viking Press). Her poetry has appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, The New Yorker, Southwest, and Grand Street. She is the winner of a Discovery Award and a Pushcart Prize IX. The Poetry Society of America awarded her both an Emily Dickinson Prize and a Consuelo Ford Award, and her work has been frequently anthologized. Celia Gilbert grew up in Washington D.C. She received a B.A. from Smith College and an M.A. from Boston University and was Poetry and Fiction Editor of The Boston Phoenix. After living abroad in England and France, she now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
January 6, 2016
A moving chapbook of poems, where we first witness the foreignness of a grey, unforgiving city before we realize the depth of loss and grief that the author holds. This collection recounts the time Gilbert, an American print maker and poet, spent in Paris, shortly after losing her daughter.
A collection of short poems that are accessible, often spare and emotionally restrained; the depth of Gilbert's grief is manifest in the concrete scenes she describes with grace and confidence. In the opening poem, "Dust", she writes
...
Foreigners ask foreigners for directions.
Apartments to rent offer shabby bombast:
fake antiques, threadbare needlepoint,
freckled plates.
...
Home was all of us together. We're exiles now.
In this collection, memories are often close and immediate: a fearful but trusting hand clutching one's own, the air leaving one's lungs; but the present and the surrounding are either far in the horizon -- a leaden sky, a looming Eiffel Tower -- or limited to the bodily senses -- a violet-red, bitter-tasting blood orange. The surrounding, the bubble of space between the self and the far-away is obliterated, as if it's too much pain, too difficult to see what's around, the reality that the world even exists, still.
...
I go round the grindstone reducing grain
to something that could be bread.
The everyday circle of living, and being alive is an exhausting feat for Gilbert, but in her poetry, one witness the eye for beauty and transcendence in the harshest moments. The scenes and nuggets of beauty bursting from the seams of bleakness is perhaps what poems do for a person in grief, as a reminder of the comfort there yet rests in a world that is broken into shreds.
An ark is a place of refuge, where you can curl up into a ball, and for a moment pretend to be safe from the storm and raging tides. The epitaph of the collection is a quote from Marcus Aurelius:
"All of us are creatures of the day;
the remembered and the remembered alike"
Another translation of Aurelius' quotation reads "All of us are creatures of a day" -- both memory and the object of memory are ephemeral, there'll be a day when both are forgotten. This collection, in my opinion, by being a repository of moments, is an ark of sorts for these ephemeral memories, the memories that are rewritten and forgotten as they are remembered, as the object of memory fades further into a distant kingdom and the remember moves closer to his living world.
Reading this collection reminded me of another wonderful collection, using poetry as a way to narrate and expel the grief of a gravely ill child is Maria Hummel's House and Fire.
A collection of short poems that are accessible, often spare and emotionally restrained; the depth of Gilbert's grief is manifest in the concrete scenes she describes with grace and confidence. In the opening poem, "Dust", she writes
...
Foreigners ask foreigners for directions.
Apartments to rent offer shabby bombast:
fake antiques, threadbare needlepoint,
freckled plates.
...
Home was all of us together. We're exiles now.
In this collection, memories are often close and immediate: a fearful but trusting hand clutching one's own, the air leaving one's lungs; but the present and the surrounding are either far in the horizon -- a leaden sky, a looming Eiffel Tower -- or limited to the bodily senses -- a violet-red, bitter-tasting blood orange. The surrounding, the bubble of space between the self and the far-away is obliterated, as if it's too much pain, too difficult to see what's around, the reality that the world even exists, still.
...
I go round the grindstone reducing grain
to something that could be bread.
The everyday circle of living, and being alive is an exhausting feat for Gilbert, but in her poetry, one witness the eye for beauty and transcendence in the harshest moments. The scenes and nuggets of beauty bursting from the seams of bleakness is perhaps what poems do for a person in grief, as a reminder of the comfort there yet rests in a world that is broken into shreds.
An ark is a place of refuge, where you can curl up into a ball, and for a moment pretend to be safe from the storm and raging tides. The epitaph of the collection is a quote from Marcus Aurelius:
"All of us are creatures of the day;
the remembered and the remembered alike"
Another translation of Aurelius' quotation reads "All of us are creatures of a day" -- both memory and the object of memory are ephemeral, there'll be a day when both are forgotten. This collection, in my opinion, by being a repository of moments, is an ark of sorts for these ephemeral memories, the memories that are rewritten and forgotten as they are remembered, as the object of memory fades further into a distant kingdom and the remember moves closer to his living world.
Reading this collection reminded me of another wonderful collection, using poetry as a way to narrate and expel the grief of a gravely ill child is Maria Hummel's House and Fire.
Displaying 1 of 1 review