Jack Gilbert is a sage among poets. In Refusing Heaven, he reflects on the very full life he’s lived. Lovers, friends, places he’s been, figure prominently among the 87 poems contained in this volume.
The opening poem, "A Brief for the Defense," is one of the longer poems in the collection, and sets the reader up for Gilbert’s keen eye to not only the pleasures of a well-lived life, but the sorrows of life’s great losses as well. The poem begins with “Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies / are not starving someplace, they are starving / somewhere else.”
But Gilberts goes on in the poem to proclaim that “We must risk delight,” and that “To make injustice the only / measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.” While Gilbert pays much attention to the loss of his two great loves – Linda Gregg and Michiko Nogami – the attention to the silver linings of all the dark clouds are what the reader will take away from the poems. For example, these lines from “The Negligible”:
…The spirit cherishes
the disregarded. It is because the body continues
to fail at remembering the smell of Michiko
that her body is so clear in me after all this time.
There is a special pleasure in remembering the shine
on her spoon merging with faint sounds
in the distance of her rising from the bathwater.
Many of the poems in this collection are quite short – many ten lines or fewer – vignettes and remembrances. One could say the 88th poem is the book itself, taken as a whole, a guide to cherishing every moment of our own lives.
92 pages.
