The Dance Most of All [Hardcover]

"The Dance Most of All" offers clear evidence that Gilbert's powers have waned. The searing honesty, wisdom and beauty which characterized his two previous collections are present but in a much less passionate way. There are
no poems of the oracular efficacy of " Dante Dancing" or "Failing and Flying".
While it may not be fair to criticize a poet's later work by reference to those preceding it, the drop-off in
intensity is intensely felt. There are memorable lines and tidy poems which those who like Mr. Gilbert's work must and will have, but it is recommended that those unfamiliar with him, start with the earlier works and let their vigor startle your soul into fuller life.

That being said, I would recommend the following poems: "Waiting and Finding", "Winter Happiness in Greece",
"Becoming Regardless", "The Danger of Wisdom" "Summer at Blue Creek, N.C.", "The Answer" and "Cherishing What Isn't".

"The Danger of Wisdom" presents simple declarative sentences which urge us by counter example to live passionately
and to expend our passion:

"We learn to live without passion.
To be reasonable....We store up plenty
For when we are old and mild."

Gilbert then relates anecdotes about two famous writers, Keats and Emerson. We`are told that Keats, listening to his doctor, attended to a stricter diet for his tuberculosis, starving himself to death
"because he yearned
so desperately to feast on Fanny Brawne."

On the other hand, Emerson and his wife made love " sparingly in order to accumulate his passion. "

The close of the poem brings us back to its beginning:

"We are taught to be
moderate. To live intelligently"

Keats's story is enclosed between the look-alike first and last two lines. But the poem's title points us to that
behavior which Gilbert truly considers wise. Our moderate, reasonable, passionless lives, out lives where we accumulate our passions but not overspend them, cannot achieve the perfect, passionate wisdom of Keats who acted
in an extreme way because he was desperate to expend his passion on Fanny Brawne.

" Waiting and Finding " is a fine example of what Mr. Gilbert has always done well-- presenting a simple personal anecdote which he uses to signify his self-illumination. The anecdote takes us back to kindergarten where the poet,
unlike everybody else who would run to get the tom-toms with " their Chinese look ", always had a triangle.
Triangle people primarily wait for the signal to hit them once after a lot of tambourine and tom-tom playing.
He remembers that perfect, shimmering sound and relates it to the course of his adult life:

"... sound that has lasted all his long life.
Fading out and coming again after a while.Getting lost
and the waiting for it to come again. Waiting meaning
without things. Meaning love sometimes dying out,
sometimes being taken away. Meaning that often he lives
silent in the middle of the world's music. Waiting
for the best to come again. Beginning to hear the silence
as he waits. Beginning to like the silence maybe too much."

Mr. Gilbert has provided us with many poems of shimmering intensity during his career.
He has managed to wrest sense and sound from those silent intervals he endured while the rest
of us overfilled the air with our almost ceaseless cacophony.

Jack Gilbert's printed output is slim but among the most powerful poetry you will ever read. Refusing Heaven bespoke a maturity, a clarity of vision and language that literally blew my mind. The Dance Most of All is even better (an impossibility in my view). The same subjects are present, the death of his beloved Japanese wife, Memories of Pittsburgh, of the places he's lived and visited throughout the world but it is in fact a travelogue of the human soul. Gilbert deserves ten thousand stars. he is a poet to read and treasure.

Jack Gilbert, The Dance Most of All (Knopf, 2009)

My run of excellent poetry continues (though it did die, however briefly, a few days after this review was written; cf. Let's Talk Honestly: My Poetry review earlier this issue) with Jack Gilbert's National Book Critics Circle Award-winning 2009 tome. From the opening lines, you know you're dealing with someone who is very, very good at what he does:

"It pleases him that the villa is on a mountain
flayed bare by the great sun. All around
are a thousand stone walls in ruin. He likes knowing
the house was built by the king's telegrapher...."
("Everywhere and Forever")

Observation and history intertwined and not a word more than is necessary. Sentence structure is standard, with just a bit of word choice ("flayed bare by the great sun") to distinguish it from prose--but distinguished it is, and there is once again a sense of the thinness of the line between prose and poetry, but at the same time that understanding that the less finesse with which you straddle it, the wider it becomes. (As I mentioned before, Let's Talk Honestly. When you pitch headlong onto the poetry side of the chasm, you run to doggerel...)

Now, we're all aware of books that start off with a bang and then fall off the proverbial cliff, but that generally doesn't happen with poetry; it's tough to fake quality, and so once you know that you're going to be thrilled with this book, you'll immerse yourself in its pleasures. Yes, it's that good. Gilbert drops the formality eventually, though even his raunchiest moments seem to come with a curious distance to them (this, perhaps, is the reason the jacket copy hastened to qualify this as a "late-in-life" collection), but he never allows the sharp eyes and the ear for diction to slip. In some odd way, Gilbert's work reminds me of Hayden Carruth's, though I've never been able to quantify that link in my head; I'm just throwing it out there for reference. In any case, this is a phenomenal little book, and you want it. A shoo-in for my beast reads of the year list come December. **** ½