I’ve been reading Jack Gilbert’s new book of poetry Refusing Heaven, which The American Poetry Review praised as being "Serious and unflinching." It is also last year’s winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. I plan to review the book when my life becomes less hectic. But I am hooked with his style, themes, and subject matter.
Since April is poetry month, I wanted to start it all off with Jack Gilbert and his poetry from his previous works: Views of Jeopardy, winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize (1962), Monolithos, winner of Stanley Kunitz Prize and the American Poetry Review Prize; and The Great Fires.
Today, I introduce you to one of my favorites from Gilbert, "The Abnormal is Not Courage," from Views of Jeopardy.
The Poles rode out from Warsaw against the German
Tanks on horses. Rode knowing, in sunlight, with sabers,
A magnitude of beauty that allows me no peace.
And yet this poem would lessen that day. Question
The bravery. Say it's not courage. Call it a passion.
Would say courage isn't that. Not at its best.
It was impossib1e, and with form. They rode in sunlight,
Were mangled. But I say courage is not the abnormal.
Not the marvelous act. Not Macbeth with fine speeches.
The worthless can manage in public, or for the moment.
It is too near the whore's heart: the bounty of impulse,
And the failure to sustain even small kindness.
Not the marvelous act, but the evident conclusion of being.
Not strangeness, but a leap forward of the same quality.
Accomplishment. The even loyalty. But fresh.
Not the Prodigal Son, nor Faustus. But Penelope.
The thing steady and clear. Then the crescendo.
The real form. The culmination. And the exceeding.
Not the surprise. The amazed understanding. The marriage,
Not the month's rapture. Not the exception. The beauty
That is of many days. Steady and clear.
It is the normal excellence, of long accomplishment.
Gilbert’s poetry has been featured in The American Poetry Review, The Quarterly, Poetry, Ironwood, The Kenyon Review, The New Yorker, and other journals. He’s been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize twice. Refusing Heaven is published by Knopf.
Additional Reading and Reviews for Jack Gilbert
Ploughshares Review of The Great Fires
Bio and selected works on American Poems
Bio from the Academy of American Poets
Bio on Wikipedia with links to articles and reviews
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