"Can you understand being alone so long/you would go out in the middle of the night/and put a bucket into the well/so you could feel something down there/tug at the other end of the rope?"
This is the question Jack Gilbert asks the reader who stumbles upon his poem, "Abandoned Valley." It’s the perfect question that represents the heavy thread of loneliness woven through the lines of his latest, and masterful work, Refusing Heaven.
Even the cover of the collection depicts the theme, displaying broken statues, deep fissures, and figures of wide-bellied natives jutting out of a granite rock temple that stands in the foreground of a sheer granite cliff that is being held up by Tuscan-like columns. Amidst this domineering, and starkly lonely landscape, sits a solitary little native girl high upon the edge of a rock dwelling.
Read the entire review at MiPoesias Blog.
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