The Great Fires: Poems, 1982-1992.

Edmund wilson famously collected in his book The Shock of Recognition the reactions of major writers when they came unexpectedly upon a masterpiece. He reminded us of what it would be like, if one had never heard of the book, to read Moby Dick for the first time. The greatest shock of recognition ever recorded, so far as I know, was that of the 20-year-old John Keats when he first "looked into" George Chapman's Elizabethan translation of Homer's Odyssey: "Then felt I like some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken." Like Cortez (it was really Balboa, but Cortez sounds better) viewing the Pacific Ocean, Keats feels that he stands "Silent upon a peak in Darien."

I had never heard of the poet Jack Gilbert, even though I keep up with these things. That I know so little about him is clearly by design. He has published, now, three slim volumes, and he prefers to let his poetry speak for itself, without any external self-promotion. Don't look for Jack Gilbert on the Donahue show. I gather from the poems themselves that he grew up in Pittsburgh and has lived all over the world. The seacoast and hill towns of Italy are vivid here, but so is Asia, and so is, well, everywhere. He lives in San Francisco. His wife, Michiko, to whom this latest book of poems is dedicated, is a major presence in the poems themselves; but she has died.

The poems are splendidly accessible even at first reading. This modernist is not handing us Finnegans Wake or the Cantos. But, for those who are well-informed and can listen attentively, it is obvious that Mr. Gilbert writes, layer upon layer, with a vast deposit of literature in his mind.

His assimilation of literature, Western and Eastern, is so complete that he can use it with astonishing lucidity and seeming ease. He is a great love poet, but also a sort of ascetic whose asceticism sharpens his senses almost to the point where pleasure and pain coincide:

You hear yourself walking on the snow. You hear the absence of the birds. A stillness so complete, you hear the whispering inside of you.

Is she more apparent because she is not any more forever? Is her whiteness more white because she was the color of honey?

That's Michiko Nogami (1946-1982), the Beatrice of this Divine Comedy. Gilbert knows all about the Michiko-Beatrice parallels. A major poem here is entitled "Dante Dancing."

In a remarkable poem entitled "Finding Something" (finding what? Poetry, I suppose), Mr. Gilbert uses the modernist technique of stylistic pastiche. He begins with a pseudohaiku: "I say the moon is horses in the tempered dark, / Because horse is the closest I can get to it." (On that second line, re-read the first three lines of Eliot's "Prufrock.") Then there follows a cliche Chinese scene. But all of this isn't working. Not working at all. Why? Western empirical fact comes crashing into the poem, crashing through the haiku horses and the Chinese print: "Michiko is dying in the house behind me."

In notably direct terms he describes her final days; she is too weak to attend to her own basic needs. They are living in very reduced circumstances in Italy. (Why such reduced circumstances? For his poetry, undoubtedly.) Robert Frost is very much present in this poem, Frost with his poetry of "fact." So is Eliot in Gilbert's concluding retreat from fact, which is temporary and ironic.

The arches of her feet are like voices of children calling in the groves of lemon trees

Yes, the arches of her feet are healthy, though she is not. Is that a friendly poke at Eliot's Four Quartets? You bet it is. The hidden laughter of children had a numinous quality for Eliot - cf., from "Burnt Norton":

Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children, Hidden excitedly, containing laughter ...

Okay, says Jack Gilbert, but within this particular moment the poetry of fact asserts itself: "Michiko is dying in the house behind me." Or,

To tell the truth, Storyville as brutal. The parlors of even the fancy whorehouses crawling with roaches and silverfish.

Yet beyond the muck and death, there is exquisite beauty. The Devil himself

. . . allows us to eat roast goat on the mountain above Parakia.

Let us stumble for the first time, unprepared, onto the buildings of Palladio in moonlight. Maybe he is not good at his job. I believe he loves us against his will. Because of the women and how the men struggle to hear inside them.

I know of nothing in Western or any other literature like Mr. Gilbert's great love poem "Alone." Gilbert's international sensibility somehow manages here to make one entertain, if only for a moment, the Japanese teaching of reincarnation. Hold onto your hat. The whole 19-line structure works up to the last five words: "the way it always did."

I never thought Michiko would come back after she died. But if she did, I knew it would be as a lady in a long white dress. It is strange that she has returned as somebody's dalmatian. I meet the man walking her on a leash almost every week. He says good morning and I stoop down to calm her. He said once that she was never like that with other people. Sometimes she is tethered on their lawn when I go by. If nobody is around I sit on the grass. When she finally quiets, she puts her head in my lap and we watch each other's eyes as

I whisper in her soft ears. She cares nothing about the mystery. She likes it best when

I touch her head and tell her small things about my days and our friends.

That makes her happy, the way it always did.

The way it always did. If poetry is the charging of language with fresh power, Mr. Gilbert has managed to lift those five words cleanly out of banality, even to use banality against itself in the service of a fresh music. Robert Frost, one of his masters, could hit the ball out of the park time after time, as in his "Pauper Witch of Grafton." The whole poem works and works toward Frost's last line, his home run: "I might have, but it doesn't seem as if." This "flat" line stands your hair on end. Jack Gilbert, too, can swing for the fences.

The severity of Mr. Gilbert's artistic discipline places him as a late modernist. As Keats said just before his death, at age 25, "I will be among the English poets." Gilbert, at age seventy, belongs among Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Hemingway, Yeats. We have a great poet on our hands, gentlemen - and who, in this day and age, would ever have dreamed of such a thing? And I, for myself, am silent upon a peak in Darien.