Flying Into Winter

Flying Into Winter

Jack Gilbert, now entering his mid-80s, is one of American poetry's most impassioned, singular and noteworthy voices. Although he has published infrequently and has spent much of his life living abroad in poverty and isolation, his reputation has grown steadily over the decades and he is now unquestionably among the most admired of living American poets. The title of his new collection, “Refusing Heaven” (Knopf, 92 pages, $16, paperback), is meant to imply that despite the unavoidable suffering of our ordinary lives, we have already lived in the real paradise. Consistent with that faith, he writes with a fierce, insistent joy even about his poverty, loneliness and the loss of those whom he has passionately loved, and seems daunted by neither illness nor aging, insisting in one poem that We make a harvest of loneliness / ... in the blank wasteland of the cosmos. He claims, in that same poem, that we are exalted by being temporary.

A master of the brief personal lyric whose work celebrates our gladness in the ruthless furnace of the world, Gilbert is a mystical sensualist, a love poet obsessed with the mystery of the female body and the miracle of erotic love, with the sweetness / of brief love and the perfection of loves / that might have been. But for him the erotic matters Not as / pleasure but a way to get to something darker. The present volume – it won the National Book Critics Circle Award – is dedicated to both the American poet Linda Gregg, his companion of several decades earlier in his life, and to the woman to whom he was married for 11 years, Michiko Nogami – both of them essential figures in the turbulent mythology of his earthly paradise.

Now and again Gilbert sabotages the austere grandeur of his vision by a failure of empathy, an adamant refusal to feel for the suffering of a hurt goat or butchered bird bleeding to death in a Greek kitchen, but on the other hand he does not pretend to be a man free of failings or at peace with himself. When a goddess in one of his poems remarks that he sounds like a man at peace, he joyfully demurs: I am not at peace ... I want to fail. I am hungry / for what I am becoming. What will you do? She asks. I will / continue north, carrying the past in my arms, flying into winter.

What is perhaps the volume's most stunning moment is, in fact, a confession of a haunting failure and regret. At Michiko's deathbed, the author tells us that he did not do what he had wished to do, as I sat there those / four hours watching her die. 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.

Steve Kowit

Posted over on the San Diego Union-Tribune