Turning into Dwelling
Poems
-
- $13.99
-
- $13.99
Publisher Description
A milestone publication of the late Christopher Gilbert's poetry, with an introduction by the National Book Award winner Terrance Hayes
Lord, the anguish of my Black block rises up in me
like a grief. My only chance to go beyond being breach—
to resist being quelled as a bit of inner city entropy—
is to speak up for the public which has birthed me.
To build this language house. To make this case. Create.
This loving which lives outside time. Lord, this is time.
—from "Turning into Dwelling"
Christopher Gilbert's award-winning Across the Mutual Landscape has become an underground classic of contemporary American poetry. Now reissued and presented with Gilbert's never-before-published last manuscript written before his death in 2007, Turning into Dwelling offers new readers the original music and vision of one of our most inventive poets.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Gilbert (1949 2007) 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Graywolf's Re/View series and edited by Mark Doty, reproduces that first and only published work alongside a previously unpublished manuscript, Chris Gilbert: An Improvisation (Music of the Striving That Was There).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 including jazz, blues, and Motown while 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.
