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pickle_burner's review
4.0
My favorite collection of Gilbert's remains The Great Fires, but this collection, his second and the first in 20 years after his initial collection, is still really strong. What I love about his writing is the spare style -- everything is stripped away except for the absolute essentials. You can tell that each line and each word in the line has been carefully considered and crafted, thoroughly scrubbed and re-scrubbed. Yet the music remains.
At times, some of his references are so direct and specific, and so little other context is provided that unless you are familiar with the oblique city/movie/song/building/etc that he is referring to, it can have little-to-no impact. But those are more the exception than the rule, and also, you know, Google.
Some of my favorite passages from the last 20-25 pages:
MEANING WELL
Marrying is like somebody
throwing the baby up.
It happy and them throwing it
higher. To the ceiling.
Which jars the loose bulb
and it goes out
as the baby starts down.
from LOSING
[...] Everything means a choice,
she had said, getting one thing and losing one. The love still
held me, but all at once I could, despite the rain, admit
to myself what I really wanted was this clarity.
PAVANE
I thought it said on the girl's red purse
A kind of sad dance and all day
wondered what was being defined.
Wisdom? The history of Poland?
All the ways of growing old?
No, I decided (walking back
to the hotel this morning), it must be love.
The real love that follows
early delight and ignorance.
A wonderful sad dance that comes after.
GETTING READY
What if the heart does not pale as the body wanes,
but is like the sun that blazes hotter each day
on these immense, perishing fields? What then?
(Desire is not the problem. This far south,
we are careful not to mistake seizures for love.)
He sits there bewildered in a clamp of light.
In the stillness, the sun grinds him clean.
MY GRAVEYARD IN TOKYO
It was hard to see the moonlight
on the gravestones
because of the neon
in the parking lot.
I said I did in my letters.
But thinking back on it now,
I don't feel sure.
At times, some of his references are so direct and specific, and so little other context is provided that unless you are familiar with the oblique city/movie/song/building/etc that he is referring to, it can have little-to-no impact. But those are more the exception than the rule, and also, you know, Google.
Some of my favorite passages from the last 20-25 pages:
MEANING WELL
Marrying is like somebody
throwing the baby up.
It happy and them throwing it
higher. To the ceiling.
Which jars the loose bulb
and it goes out
as the baby starts down.
from LOSING
[...] Everything means a choice,
she had said, getting one thing and losing one. The love still
held me, but all at once I could, despite the rain, admit
to myself what I really wanted was this clarity.
PAVANE
I thought it said on the girl's red purse
A kind of sad dance and all day
wondered what was being defined.
Wisdom? The history of Poland?
All the ways of growing old?
No, I decided (walking back
to the hotel this morning), it must be love.
The real love that follows
early delight and ignorance.
A wonderful sad dance that comes after.
GETTING READY
What if the heart does not pale as the body wanes,
but is like the sun that blazes hotter each day
on these immense, perishing fields? What then?
(Desire is not the problem. This far south,
we are careful not to mistake seizures for love.)
He sits there bewildered in a clamp of light.
In the stillness, the sun grinds him clean.
MY GRAVEYARD IN TOKYO
It was hard to see the moonlight
on the gravestones
because of the neon
in the parking lot.
I said I did in my letters.
But thinking back on it now,
I don't feel sure.
lucasmiller's review
5.0
I was first told about Jack Gilbert by the boyfriend of a girl a dear friend of mine was hopelessly in love with. I think the boyfriend in question was named Quentin. Or Ulysses. Or something. I found a copy of The Great Fires (poems, 1982-1992 a few years later, and have dipped into it many times. Perhaps because it is a volume of selected poems, I can never maintain focus or get very far into the collection per sitting. The eponymous poem is heart wrenching and there are many poems that focus on personal loss and aging and are all of them are great, but this much thinner, early and earlier collection was much more direct and immediate.
Comprised of poems from Gilbert's Yale Younger Poets winning first collection and new poems written twenty years later, Monolithos is obsessed with the environment's resistance to time. One of the descriptions of this collection call Gilbert's verse classical. I agree with this description. There is a directness and concreteness that is very unique, and reminds me of epigraphs. Of lacunae. There are hardly any adjectives. The language is littered with the Mediterranean. Greece, the Greek Isles, Rome, randomly Japan, and Pittsburgh. All of the landscapes are ancient and barren, timeworn. The affects of time are the defining action in Gilbert's work, memory leading to the more distant past. The hopefulness and beginners luck of the 1962 poems are complimented by the wisdom and good humor of the latter poems, dealing largely with the authors divorce and his travels.
Many of these poems barely take up a third of the page, but they resonate there in all that blank space. This solidity is most impressive. It isn't minimal in the way I usually thing of it. I don't hear imagists when I read these poems. It is a much more personal, essentially timeless, and in some fashion ancient narrator who speaks through these tremendous fragments.
Comprised of poems from Gilbert's Yale Younger Poets winning first collection and new poems written twenty years later, Monolithos is obsessed with the environment's resistance to time. One of the descriptions of this collection call Gilbert's verse classical. I agree with this description. There is a directness and concreteness that is very unique, and reminds me of epigraphs. Of lacunae. There are hardly any adjectives. The language is littered with the Mediterranean. Greece, the Greek Isles, Rome, randomly Japan, and Pittsburgh. All of the landscapes are ancient and barren, timeworn. The affects of time are the defining action in Gilbert's work, memory leading to the more distant past. The hopefulness and beginners luck of the 1962 poems are complimented by the wisdom and good humor of the latter poems, dealing largely with the authors divorce and his travels.
Many of these poems barely take up a third of the page, but they resonate there in all that blank space. This solidity is most impressive. It isn't minimal in the way I usually thing of it. I don't hear imagists when I read these poems. It is a much more personal, essentially timeless, and in some fashion ancient narrator who speaks through these tremendous fragments.
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