Turning into Dwelling

Gilbert (1949%E2%80%932007) won the 1983 Walt Whitman Award for his book Across the Mutual Landscape, or as Terrance Hayes remarks in his introduction, he "published a book 30 years ago and vanished." This dazzling posthumous double collection, part of Graywolf's Re/View series and edited by Mark Doty, reproduces that first and only published work alongside a previously unpublished manuscript, Chris Gilbert: An Improvisation (Music of the Striving That Was There). Mixing conversational tone with vivid imagery capable of moving speaker and reader through different incarnations, Gilbert questions the position between writer and speaker, between language and the living things it represents: "locked outside the language/ through which I am/ the things I mean." He also presents speakers whose bodies exist within working-class environments and whose minds are like the improvisational "chaos in Coltrane." Numerous poems reference African-American music%E2%80%94including jazz, blues, and Motown%E2%80%94while moving like "water music," fluid and dreamlike in inescapable rhythms. Gilbert displayed an immense capacity for empathy, as his speakers transcend various mental and physical walls, "becoming mutual/ landscape in our different lives." Yet he also declares, "i am absolutely/ the I in the writing," as he explores the prejudice he faced as a black man and contemplated his failing health. Gilbert's dynamic, wandering thoughts constantly challenge the reader "to inspect" his poems and their "geometry/ selflessly unfolding." Hayes calls Gilbert's ahead-of-its-time poetry "such strange brilliance," and he is undoubtedly right. (July)