The dance most of all Poems

Born in 1925, Gilbert has long lived in poetry, gathering major awards and private triumphs and acquiring the sparkling fluency that shapes this gracefully meditative and quietly witty collection. Gilbert has lived in many lands, and his deftly limned landscapes set the stage for playful yet incisive pastoral vignettes that are at once timeless and time-focused. Gilbert writes, He longs to live married to / slowness, the better, one imagines, to practice the art of attentiveness. Gilbert's exacting lyrics are pithy and poignant, vessels of stillness and dazzle, beauty and longing, blithe spirit and wry wisdom. He writes of Ovid and strippers, war and prayer, childhood and romance. He advocates for imperfection, and declares, The truth is, goddesses are lousy in bed. He fashions clarifying aphorisms: Goodness is a triumph. And so it is / with love. Our lives are hard to know. Music is carried on a breeze; rain is silvery, and feelings last while reason crumbles. The airiest line carries hidden cargo as Gilbert forges unexpected connections and ponders the dizzying dance of life.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2009 Booklist

This fifth collection from Gilbert (Refusing Heaven) adds an intense, almost nonstop nostalgia to the gifts his longtime devotees will recognize. After early success, Gilbert spent much of the 1960s and 1970s in rural Europe, far out of the limelight; he lived for years on a Greek island with his first wife, the poet Linda Gregg (to whom he dedicates this volume). Here he remembers his years in Greece, where "the blue Aegean is far down and the slow ships/ far out," and his almost equally bright years in rural Italy-though he also remembers the yearnings and struggles of "Growing Up in Pittsburgh." Even more than landscape or cityscape, though, Gilbert's gravelly blank verse, unrhymed sonnets and looser forms remember the pleasures and sad moments of the body and of the erotic life: "The shameful ardor/ and the shameless intimacy, the secret kinds/ of happiness and the walled-up childhoods," from first kisses to "the way love is after fifty." However tied to autobiography, Gilbert seeks not confessional poetry, but the older, more spiritually alert tradition of Rodin and Rilke: "The world is beyond us even as we own it," "Winter Happiness in Greece" begins; "It is a hugeness in which we climb towards." (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

THE SPELL CAST OVER In the old days we could see nakedness only in the burlesque houses. In the lavish theaters left over from vaudeville, ruined in the Great Depression. What had been grand gestures of huge chandeliers and mythic heroes courting the goddess on the ceiling. Now the chandeliers were grimy and the ceilings hanging in tatters. It was like the Russian aristocrats fleeing the Revolution. Ending up as taxi drivers in Paris dressed in their worn-out elegance. It was like that in the Pittsburgh of my days. Old men of shabby clothes in the empty seats at the Roxy Theater dreaming of the sumptuous headliners slowly discarding layers of their lavish gowns. Baring the secret beauty to the men of their season. The old men came from their one room (with its single, forbidden gas range) to watch the strippers.To remember what used to be. Like the gray-haired men of Ilium who waited each morning for Helen to cross over to the temple in her light raiment. The waning men longed to escape from the spell cast over them by time.To escape the imprisoned longing.To insist on dispensation.To see their young hearts just one more time. Those famous women like honeycombs.Women moving to the old music again. That former grace of flesh. The sheen of them in the sunlight, to watch them walking by the sea. SOUTH In the small towns along the river nothing happens day after long day. Summer weeks stalled forever, and long marriages always the same. Lives with only emergencies, births, and fishing for excitement. Then a ship comes out of the mist. Or comes around the bend carefully one morning in the rain, past the pines and shrubs. Arrives on a hot fragrant night, grandly, all lit up. Gone two days later, leaving fury in its wake. For Susan Crosby Lawrence Anderson CHERISHING WHAT ISN'T Ah, you three women whom I have loved in this long life, along with the few others. And the four I may have loved, or stopped short of loving. I wander through these woods making songs of you. Some of regret, some of longing, and a terrible one of death. I carry the privacy of your bodies and hearts in me. The shameful ardor and the shameless intimacy, the secret kinds of happiness and the walled-up childhoods. I carol loudly of you among trees emptied of winter and rejoice quietly in summer. A score of women if you count love both large and small, real ones that were brief and those that lasted. Gentle love and some almost like an animal with its prey. What is left is what's alive in me. The failing of your beauty and its remaining. You are like countries in which my love took place. Like a bell in the trees that makes your music in each wind that moves. A music composed of what you have forgotten. That will end with my ending. Excerpted from The Dance Most of All: Poems by Jack Gilbert All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.