Jack Gilbert, Refusing Heaven (Knopf, 2005), hbk, 112pp., $25.00.

     It is easy to imagine Jack Gilbert hears sounds the average human fails to register. Indeed, over time, the octogenarian’s senses seem only to have grown sharper, and with them, his ability to telegraph back what he hears from a distance, always the “music despite everything.” Though Gilbert’s work is recognized for its protean ease in evoking places all across Europe, Asia, and America, his landscapes are principally psychological. Refuting Nabokov’s notion that we do not think in words, Gilbert’s poetry is a steady pulse of retrospective thought, and he uses time and place to vivify the meaning of personal memory. Gilbert records “the music that thinking is” with what Patricia Hampl called a “rare serenity,” measuring out his compositions, naming and arranging structures of regret, splendor, and sorrow.  

     These lambent landscapes, however, stand far afield from the remote terrain where the private poet dwells. And all access roads between are closed. Gilbert insists that while his poems do reflect upon his own being and having been, he writes to intensify the living, not to advertise it in a public forum. He has gone so far as to say publishing “can sometimes take the joy out of poetry.” Perhaps Gilbert was burned by the blaze of his beginnings. Named the Yale Younger Poet in 1962, Gilbert captivated the popular imagination in a manner almost unimaginable to contemporary poets at the margin of American culture today. The subject matter of his debut collection, Views of Jeopardy (Yale University Press, 1962)—classical mythology, romantic love, “the spaces between the notes”—was very much the exception in an era of clever Beat articulations, and the slim volume quickly became the most stolen book in American libraries.  

     Among Gilbert’s early admirers were Theodore Roethke, Muriel Rukeyser, and Stephen Spender, and the considerable critical acclaim led to a nationwide reading tour and several press features, including cover stories in Glamour, Esquire, and the improbable Teen Magazine. With the high dramatics of a heartbreaker, Gilbert then went dark at his brightest, withdrawing from the public eye for a period of seventeen years, cloistering himself off in various degrees of separation in parts of Greece, Italy, and Japan, an effort to reject the media circus and reclaim a private artistic space. (“The idea of being a professional poet bored me,” Gilbert reportedly said.)  

     While it fairly stands to argue that no poets, nor artists of any stripe, should be hitched unwittingly to causes—the obligatory exception comes to mind, Gary Snyder and his defense of nature—Gilbert tempts such coupling, with the precedence he affords the private life. He has devoted himself to the purest artistic existence, only enduring spells as a door-to-door salesman or ESL teacher in the interest of funding crucial periods of peace. His poetry alights most often on the idea of presence in the passing moment, of the stimulation of living time, of quiet attention to daily life. Given this, the remote lifestyle is organic, necessary, to the cultivation of Gilbert’s inquiries into our place in the spiritual world, the bridges made by memory, and the incantatory effects of slow living.

     Gilbert’s longest retreat resulted in a collection of new and previously published poems, Monolithos (Knopf, 1982), and it, like Views of Jeopardy before it, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. His other two collections, the lesser-known Kochan (Tamarack) which includes four poems by his late wife, Michiko Nogami, and The Great Fires (Knopf), arrived in 1984 and 1994.

     But it was in 1982 that Helen Vendler, then the apotheosis of distinguished criticism, received Monolithos with the subtle strains of cynicism that epitomize our failure to appreciate Gilbert, as if the matters of the heart and spirit, two words the poet employs without ironic diminishment, might be the exclusive domain of Petrarch’s sonnets. In the review, Vendler seems to suggest that any species of what, in a single sentence, she calls the “myth,” the “trap,” and the “religion” of romantic love is doomed to extinction and that, in Gilbert’s admixture of “talent with sentimentality and bathos,” it is his talent, unnaturally parsed from the severe latter pairing, that rescues him from burial in the “Procrustean bed” of his “mannered” stylization.

     While Gilbert’s work is remarkably consistent in style—compressed, short verse written sometimes in sentences, but increasingly in fragments—it is to the good that he brooks no clutter. His latest collection, Refusing Heaven, is no exception to his economical mode. The poems show the grace of toned muscle hard at work.

     The best of Gilbert’s work is what I. A. Richards characterized as poetry “inexhaustible to meditation.” Gilbert, in fact, often does Richards one better, converting the gold standard of poetic quality into a currency of both writerly and readerly worth.

     In the simple exposition of “Burning (Andante Non Troppo),” Gilbert testifies alongside Richards, representing slow and sustained attentions not as the trendy remedy for hectic consumerism, but as a longstanding way of life that has historically rewarded its practitioners. Gilbert writes: 

It is the pace of our living
that makes the world available. 

Slowing down, Gilbert suggests, is a precept of holistic wellness antedating us by millennia, as old as the river rocks of Kyoto: 

The great modern buildings are
blank because there is no time to see from the car.
A thousand years ago when they built the gardens
of Kyoto, the stones were set in the streams askew.
Whoever went quickly would fall in. When we slow,
the garden can choose what we notice. 

We do not so much determine what beauty we might see in the garden stream, as whether we rush blindly past it. A poem might or might not gratify meditation ad infinitum, but anyone who has actually sat zazen for upward of twenty minutes knows it is the sitter’s degree of mental discipline that facilitates lasting revelation.

     Though Gilbert’s use of concrete imagery (here gardens, rocks, and streams) averts the risk of clever philosophical cant, he is unafraid of taking adroit cracks at the metaphysical riddles of being in the world nonetheless. How does memory serve human consciousness? What are the symbiotic bounds between the spirit and the spiritual world? Just where does the road to our beloved dead begin and what may we take with us? The questions Gilbert asks take inexhaustibility to meditation as a prerequisite.

     Donald Hall reflected in a recent letter on the heart in Gilbert’s work that we are “grabbed, again and again,” by the expression of “feeling that is difficult, like much feeling, because it contains within itself its own contradictions.” Gilbert does not shrink back from contradiction, rather he enlarges and navigates it to pinpoint sources of legitimate solace.

     Searching out what he once called “the lost vocabularies that might express some of what we no longer can express” (The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart), Gilbert is second only to Lao Tzu for presenting the paradox of sense in life, sensibility of death. (“Great sound is silence,” Lao Tzu wrote. “Great form is shapeless.”) Yet Gilbert’s method is not the axiomatic directive, not the pithy proverb. Often, the literal and figurative coalesce to initiate his serious inquiries, as in “Transgressions”: 

Long hot afternoons
                 watching ants while the cicadas railed
                 in the Chinese elm about the brevity of life. 

Ants, elms, roosters, and the canebrake, blonde wheat, paper boats, even lentils and the fried earth are all laborers that carry meaning through Gilbert’s poetic neighborhoods. In the legend of his poetic symbolism, though, everything but silence ranks below machinery.

     Machinery becomes synecdochic to a range of possible connotations throughout the body of work. It first appears in the German-titled “Kunstkammer.” Literally translated as “cabinet of curiosities,” the poem looks in part at the illusion of oneness with the universe. Gilbert proposes that we may be ghosts living within the machine, but we are not its constitution. We may give it what we understand as its reality, but at the end of the day, are mere contents in the cabinet, all but its invisible architecture. The poem functions at various magnitudes—contents in the cabinet, being in the world, spirit in the body—and Gilbert is slippery in the way he shifts from one to the next. As the poem proceeds, the cabinet comes to resemble the living body: 

We are resident inside with the machinery,
a glimmering spread throughout the apparatus. 

The poem lowers itself into the metaphor, where we expect a reinforcement of this idea of body as machinery, spirit what resides within: 

                The flesh
                 is a neighborhood, but not the life.
                 Our body is not good at memory, at keeping.
                 It is the spirit that holds onto the treasure. 

Instead, the dependent clause refines the metaphor, exposes the limits of the logic and proceeds directly into the limits of the body. Our bodies do not contain memory, Gilbert challenges. The kunstkammer, in the end, is spirit, sole custodian of treasures.

     In the next two poems, death inverts logic to become the animating force in the machinery. “Immaculate,” one of so many poems dedicated to the memory of his deceased wife, Michiko Nogami, can be seen as presenting machinery as deistic in nature. Gilbert laments Nogami-san’s death, her spirit’s departure from the body, and imagines the machinery of the universe doing its work to shuttle a severed soul back into the transcendent circuit: 

Now it is just machines talking
                 to the machine. Helping it back
                 to its old, pure journey. 

Alternatively, “Immaculate” could just as easily be read as a study of the physical body freed from mind and spirit. Gilbert manages to locate both the communion of a spirit with the spiritual world and the serenity of a body at rest, all in the two-letter word from the excerpt’s first line, “it.”

     “By Small and Small: Midnight to Four AM,” on the other hand, reveals machinery to be an impediment, this time on the near side of death:  

I wanted / to crawl in among the machinery
and hold her in my arms, knowing
the elementary, leftover bit of her
mind would dimly recognize it was me
carrying her to where she was going. 

Taken very literally, the machinery evokes IVs, oxygen tubes, and heart monitors, but could also suggest the body surrendering itself, slowly rendering a loved one inaccessible.  

     In the same New York Review of Books essay, Helen Vendler favored Gilbert at what I think would be this tempo and tonality, when he permits himself “more freedom of feeling, more variety of thought.” Though we have seen Gilbert is adept at dismantling the complexities inherent to our relationships, these retrospective poems seem to land him in such unenviable, if well-accompanied, position as an entry in the National Poetry Almanac’s themed category, “Poems for Break-Ups or Divorce.” True, his fellows in irreconcilable difference include Elizabeth Bishop and her famed villanelle, “One Art,” and Robert Lowell with his rejoinder to the old-fashioned tirade, “Man and Wife,” but Gilbert deserves a footnote; he seems to see it—divorce, death, and all—as sacred ground.

     I find Gilbert most interesting when he casts forward, writing notation on the music of memory. In a characteristically lovely description, Donald Hall wrote that Gilbert “is looking back from the hill of antiquity on the traffic of long life.” Indeed, Gilbert’s view in his title poem, “Refusing Heaven,” not insignificantly narrated third-person, sweeps straight into the provinces of childhood, to the “ninety-two bridges / across the two rivers of his youth.” Forced to choose between this life and the prospect of paradise, 

he chooses
against the Lord. He will not abandon his life. 

He turns his back because he cannot imagine giving up the rich significance of life. Gilbert remembers the mills “where he became a young man as he worked” and immediately admits: 

The mills are eaten away, and eaten
again by the sun and its rusting. He needs them
even though they are gone, to measure against. 

Gilbert digs his heels in at the gates of heaven and insists if we must surrender, we will need to take our memories with us. Still, he acknowledges the futility of such a resolve, by choosing to measure his life against structures since destroyed, mills now gone. 

     In “Moreover,” a poem strikingly entitled in medias res, Gilbert continues the same argument, extending the power memory might provide us: 

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.  

Our secret holdings belong in memory, and even if we lose that, as everything may be lost, we have harvested what it meant. This is Gilbert as bodhisattva, forgoing the prospect of his own salvation, only for the preservation of worldly love. Gilbert’s grace is the holiness of memory and the resonant meaning such few words can sound. The poem entitled “Music Is In the Piano Only When It Is Played” completes a sketch of reality with the fragment: 

In the quiet that is the music of that place,
which is the difference between silence and windlessness. 

Whether the reader is I. A. Richards, Lao Tzu, or Helen Vendler, each must hear the music that comes with the quieting the mind—and thinking what a difference this really is.

— Elizabeth Kennedy