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A review by xterminal
The Dance Most of All: Poems by Jack Gilbert
5.0
Jack Gilbert, The Dance Most of All (Knopf, 2009)
My run of excellent poetry continues (though it did die, however briefly, a few days after this review was written; cf. Let's Talk Honestly: My Poetry review earlier this issue) with Jack Gilbert's National Book Critics Circle Award-winning 2009 tome. From the opening lines, you know you're dealing with someone who is very, very good at what he does:
“It pleases him that the villa is on a mountain
flayed bare by the great sun. All around
are a thousand stone walls in ruin. He likes knowing
the house was built by the king's telegrapher....”
(“Everywhere and Forever”)
Observation and history intertwined and not a word more than is necessary. Sentence structure is standard, with just a bit of word choice (“flayed bare by the great sun”) to distinguish it from prose—but distinguished it is, and there is once again a sense of the thinness of the line between prose and poetry, but at the same time that understanding that the less finesse with which you straddle it, the wider it becomes. (As I mentioned before, Let's Talk Honestly. When you pitch headlong onto the poetry side of the chasm, you run to doggerel...)
Now, we're all aware of books that start off with a bang and then fall off the proverbial cliff, but that generally doesn't happen with poetry; it's tough to fake quality, and so once you know that you're going to be thrilled with this book, you'll immerse yourself in its pleasures. Yes, it's that good. Gilbert drops the formality eventually, though even his raunchiest moments seem to come with a curious distance to them (this, perhaps, is the reason the jacket copy hastened to qualify this as a “late-in-life” collection), but he never allows the sharp eyes and the ear for diction to slip. In some odd way, Gilbert's work reminds me of Hayden Carruth's, though I've never been able to quantify that link in my head; I'm just throwing it out there for reference. In any case, this is a phenomenal little book, and you want it. A shoo-in for my beast reads of the year list come December. **** ½
My run of excellent poetry continues (though it did die, however briefly, a few days after this review was written; cf. Let's Talk Honestly: My Poetry review earlier this issue) with Jack Gilbert's National Book Critics Circle Award-winning 2009 tome. From the opening lines, you know you're dealing with someone who is very, very good at what he does:
“It pleases him that the villa is on a mountain
flayed bare by the great sun. All around
are a thousand stone walls in ruin. He likes knowing
the house was built by the king's telegrapher....”
(“Everywhere and Forever”)
Observation and history intertwined and not a word more than is necessary. Sentence structure is standard, with just a bit of word choice (“flayed bare by the great sun”) to distinguish it from prose—but distinguished it is, and there is once again a sense of the thinness of the line between prose and poetry, but at the same time that understanding that the less finesse with which you straddle it, the wider it becomes. (As I mentioned before, Let's Talk Honestly. When you pitch headlong onto the poetry side of the chasm, you run to doggerel...)
Now, we're all aware of books that start off with a bang and then fall off the proverbial cliff, but that generally doesn't happen with poetry; it's tough to fake quality, and so once you know that you're going to be thrilled with this book, you'll immerse yourself in its pleasures. Yes, it's that good. Gilbert drops the formality eventually, though even his raunchiest moments seem to come with a curious distance to them (this, perhaps, is the reason the jacket copy hastened to qualify this as a “late-in-life” collection), but he never allows the sharp eyes and the ear for diction to slip. In some odd way, Gilbert's work reminds me of Hayden Carruth's, though I've never been able to quantify that link in my head; I'm just throwing it out there for reference. In any case, this is a phenomenal little book, and you want it. A shoo-in for my beast reads of the year list come December. **** ½