Although no relation, writer Elizabeth Gilbert has been singing poet Jack Gilbert's praises while on the tour circuit to promote her new book, Big Magic. Gilbert-she deems Gilbert-he the "poet laureate of her life". 
 Jack Gilbert died in 2012 at the age of 87, and I wonder what he would make of his new-found fame; he, so determined to live a life apart, under the radar, untouched by ambition. 
 I call it exile, or being relegated. 
 I call it the provinces. 
 And all the time it is my heart. 
 My imperfect heart which prefers 
 this distance from people. Prefers 
 the half-meetings which cannot lead 
 to intimacy. Provisional friendships 
 that are interrupted near the beginning. 
 A pleasure in not communicating. 
 And inside, no despair or longing. 
 A taste for solitude. The knowledge 
 that love preserves freedom in always 
 failing. An exile by nature. Where, 
 indeed, would I ever be a citizen? 
 ~Spring 
 This one of the last poems I read in Collected Poems and it joins a host of others I have tagged, for it speaks of my soul. My imperfect heart which prefers this distance from people. Prefers the half-meetings which cannot lead to intimacy. The introvert who is often disappointed by intimacy . . . a taste for solitude. A poet who knows my heart. 
 Yet, deep bonds are possible, though few and far between. Jack Gilbert writes often of his second wife, Michiko, who died of cancer when she was just 36 and they'd had barely ten years together. That singular devotion ripples through much of his work, which is quiet, reflective and unironically, unabashedly poetic. 
 People complain about too many moons in my poetry 
 Gilbert's poetry speaks often of place. His hometown, Pittsburgh, and his later years in New England, are grounded in American sensibility and industry. Yet, he wandered for years in Europe, living in Greece and Italy, as well as a span of time in Japan, and the sensuality of these cultures--the textures of food and sea, of hillsides and heat--shimmers in his work. 
 But it is the mornings 
 that are hard to relinquish, and music 
 and cucumbers. Rain on trees, empty 
 piazzas in small towns flooded with sun. 
 What we are busy with doesn't make us 
 groan ah! ah! as we will for the nights 
 and the cucumbers. Cucumbers and longing. The busy-ness of life that causes us to miss the pleasures of cucumbers and the solace of night. 
 The poet writes of things that poets write of: grief, sex, despair, God, autumn leaves, seafood, snow. His language is is beautiful and clear, a clarion of profound emotion expressed like a stream of the clearest water. 
 There was the scraping 
 sound in the piles of dead leaves on the lavish veranda. 
 And occasionally the bright sounds of broken glass. 
 All of it a blessing. The being there. Being alive then. 
 Like a giant bell ringing long after you can't hear it. 
 He is a romantic 
 The arches of her feet are like voices 
 of children calling in the grove of lemon trees, 
 where my heart is as helpless as crushed birds. 
 ~Finding Something 
 but always clear-eyed, always aware of the paradoxes in life, the ever-present shadow of suffering, chased back by the bright, white light of the wonder of being alive. I treasure this collection for the many ways he enters a thought, a theme, through the simplest of objects and precision of language. His poems are short- most a page or less-drops of water beading on skin. He allows for quiet observation, for simplicity that resonates. 
 This collection contains Gilbert's most famous poem, A Brief for the Defense, which makes me think of so much of his poetic contemporary, and another favorite of mine, Richard Hugo. Men born between world wars, coming of age in the beatnik years, their voices that shaped by the contours of land, isolation, sadness and freedom that no longer exists in this hyper-connected world. 
 A Brief For The Defense 
 Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies 
 are not starving someplace, they are starving 
 somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils. 
 But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants. 
 Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not 
 be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not 
 be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women 
 at the fountain are laughing together between 
 the suffering they have known and the awfulness 
 in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody 
 in the village is very sick. There is laughter 
 every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta, 
 and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay. 
 If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction, 
 we lessen the importance of their deprivation. 
 We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure, 
 but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have 
 the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless 
 furnace of this world. To make injustice the only 
 measure of our attention is to praise the Devil. 
 If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down, 
 we should give thanks that the end had magnitude. 
 We must admit there will be music despite everything. 
 We stand at the prow again of a small ship 
 anchored late at night in the tiny port 
 looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront 
 is three shuttered cafes and one naked light burning. 
 To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat 
 comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth 
 all the years of sorrow that are to come.