Collected poems

IT is impossible to picture certain poets buying Cheetos at a Sunoco. Granted, this is true of a particular sort of person in any occupation - it's hard, for example, to imagine Mitt Romney with iridescent orange dust all over his hands, unless he had accidentally purchased Halloween. But there is a kind of poet for whom involvement in the tackier, saltier elements of everyday life and popular culture seems not only unlikely, but almost inappropriate. Robinson Jeffers, for example, wrote lines like "I'd sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk" and praised "the massive / Mysticism of stone" and the "implacable arrogance" of birds of prey, while enjoying watching orcas maul sea lions because "there was nothing human involved ... no lies, no smirk and no malice." One struggles to envision him at a Bennigan's happy hour. This kind of poet is relatively rare nowadays. (More common is the writer who invokes pop culture while remaining carefully distanced from it; who titles poems or books something like "The Rambo Variations"; who buttresses Walter Benjamin with Jay-Z.) The scarcity of poets like Jeffers is in many ways not such a bad thing. After all, daily life can be as vividly poetic as death or birth or sex, and a poet who seems disconnected from that reality risks becoming disconnected from a certain kind of reader. And poetry, so the convention goes, is already about as disconnected as an art form can get. Still, what counts as the dailiness of life depends on the type of life we lead - so it's perhaps helpful that some poets resist the idea that day-to-day existence is best described in terms of consumer culture. Jack Gilbert is one of those writers. Gilbert is now 87, and his recent COLLECTED POEMS (Knopf, $35) is a monument to an aesthetic off the grid. Born in Pittsburgh, he had moved by the late 1950s to San Francisco, where he took part in Jack Spicer's poetry workshops and met Allen Ginsberg, who showed early versions of "Howl" to him. Gilbert won the Yale Younger Poets competition in 1962 and a few years later left for Europe, spending a good bit of the next 20-odd years living abroad in near poverty. His entire body of work consists of only five books, and the "Collected" volume comes in at only 380 pages. (This is probably 1,000 pages less than the collected work of John Ashbery, who is about the same age.) Gilbert doesn't do many events, almost never appears at conferences and probably has spent more time with Greek fishermen than with college sophomores. As you might expect, his writing is somewhat unfashionable by contemporary standards. Gilbert regularly deploys words like "light," "dark," "love," "heart," "soul," "spirit" and "moon" in a way that, while not naïve, tends to lack any leavening irony. "People complain about too many moons in my poetry," he writes, adding another. He deals plainly with grief, love, marriage, betrayal, lust and more lust, often with a little rural Mediterranean color: "Goats occasionally, and the sound of roosters." While Gilbert can work in form (his first book contains a villanelle, some haiku and a partial sestina), he prefers orderly free verse constructions that take up about one-half to three-quarters of a page. The phrasing tends to be a bit decorous (he "cannot" more than half as much as he "can't"), the work more concerned with physical sensations than the trappings of personality. Lines like "But Apollo is not reasonable about desire" are typical. Nouns like "sorrow" and "body" are common; ones like "mopiness" and "noggin" are nonexistent. Gilbert sounds, in other words, like a man who's spent a lot of time on a Greek island doing nothing but cleaning squid, having affairs and thinking about poetry and purity. If some poets seem eager to play tour guide, to show you every knickknack in the flea market while keeping up a constant stream of patter, a good Gilbert poem is content simply to stare at you - not hostile, not friendly, just very focused. It's a stark approach that can work well with stark subject matter. Consider "Michiko Dead," one of many lovely poems about the death of his wife at age 36. The poem begins, "He manages like somebody carrying a box / that is too heavy" and continues the conceit as it concludes: He moves his thumbs slightly when the fingers begin to tire, and it makes different muscles take over. Afterward, he carries it on his shoulder, until the blood drains out of the arm that is stretched up to steady the box and the arm goes numb. But now the man can hold underneath again, so that he can go on without ever putting the box down. Grief is survivable ("he can go on"), but only at the price of making it perpetual ("without ever putting the box down"). The poem is plain as can be, yet Gilbert captures all the evolving complexity of mourning, the sad reality that when one method of coping becomes exhausted, "different muscles take over" that will themselves quickly tire. The closer Gilbert sticks to neutral observation, the better his poems tend to be. He's particularly comfortable with the ambiguities of romance (maybe a little too comfortable), as in "Trying to Be Married": Watching my wife out in the full moon, the sea bright behind her across the field and through the trees. Eight years and her love for me quieted away. How fine she is. How hard we struggle. Gilbert delicately balances their "struggle" to stay together with the "struggle" they have with each other. The poem resolves into uncertainty, and he knows well enough to leave it alone. There's similar restraint in the strange "Textures," in which the narrator pauses to urinate during a nighttime walk: She stopped just beyond. I aimed at the stone wall of a vineyard, but the wind took it and she made a sound. I apologized. "It's all right," she said out of the dark, her voice different. "I liked it." Notice how much the poem depends on the use of the word "different," rather than, say, "aroused" or "excited" or "intrigued." What we are like in "the dark" - of sex, of physicality - is more than anything else simply "different." This, Gilbert implies, is what frightens and compels us. It's an elegant point delivered with understated accuracy. Such subtlety is not, alas, always the rule in Gilbert's work. Like a lot of poets who are more interested in the spirit of the art than its technical felicities, Gilbert sometimes inflates lines into life lessons: "Grief makes the heart / apparent as much as sudden happiness can." Or "The way my heart carols sometimes, / and other times yearns." Or "A wonderful sad dance that comes after." Gassy balloons like these drag the worst of Gilbert's poems completely off the ground. A similar problem extends to the scores of women in his poetry, all of them exactly alike and frequently doing something Passionate or True or Simple. (To be fair, any poet whose work inclines toward myth is going to have a habit of turning people into archetypes.) Nor is the sense of sameness relieved by formal variety, as Gilbert works a few simple techniques nearly to death. He relies heavily on gerund phrases followed by periods as a drama-heightening method. In nine pages we have: "Going over and over afterward / what we should have done / instead of what we did." "Trying to escape the mildness of our violent world." "Making together a consequence of America." "Carrying / Michiko dead in my arms." "Trying to see if something / comes next." "Wondering whether he has stalled." Noticing this formula. Noticing it a little too much. Gilbert at his worst can be like a hermit determined to tell you all about his devotion to solitude and the women beautiful and lonely as stars whom he totally slept with. But if it's easy to poke fun at Gilbert's least interesting work, this is precisely what makes his strongest writing memorable. He isn't afraid of embarrassment. He doesn't hedge his bets. He believes that poetry is worthy of devotion, that it ought not be subordinated to the things that clutter up day-to-day life. He isn't right, and he sets up an unnecessary division. But neither is he completely wrong. Poets have always been tempted to live poetry, not merely to write it. If the work of poets like Gilbert and Jeffers mostly demonstrates that this ambition is impossible, there are still good poems to be found in the demonstration. To take Gilbert slightly out of context: "The silver is worn down to the brass underneath / and is the better for it." The better, unlike the perfect, being no enemy of the good.

Gilbert has long held legendary status among poetry readers for his wise, hard-won poems about the joys and complexities of romantic love, about grief and about the power of experience deeply felt. His 1994 collection The Great Fires (which is included here in its entirety) is, for many, practically a sacred text. The publication of Gilbert's complete body of work to date is doubtless a literary event. From his Yale Younger Poet's Prize-winning debut, Gilbert's poems have felt wise beyond their years and yet youthful, full of contradictions that give them life: "Joy has been a habit," he writes in one early poem, which concludes, "Now/ suddenly/ this rain." Here are also many and many kinds of poems about travel or life in far-flung places, particularly Greece. Plentiful, too, are poems of marriage-its difficulties ("Eight years/ and her love for me quieted away"), its ecstasies, and its ending: divorce is memorably figured as "looking/ out at the bright moonlight on concrete." Gilbert is perhaps best known, however, for the grief-stricken poems that chart the dying of and then mourning over his wife, Michiko, of whom he writes, "The arches of her feet are like voices/ of children calling in the grove of lemon trees,/ where my heart is as helpless as crushed birds." All poetry lovers will want this book. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.