Jack Gilbert is a poet of reckless charisma and its aftermaths. I suspect he would like to be seen as a catch-as-catch-can Castiglione, consigned by the waywardness of his imagination to write his canon of manners and gestures in lyric poetry. The poems have the quality of brilliant, searching, addled talk after a wild night out. There's a sort of strung-out sprezzatura to this poet, as he bobs and weaves among the memories of old loves in old, European cities. Like the Beats, Gilbert is a master at classic backdrops and stage-sets—panoramic rural settings, intimate piazzas, stone fountains—that give his wanderings of mind and heart an allegorical ring.

These poems are the stream-of-consciousness work of a consciousness radically narrowed over time, practically armored against new experience. At their best, shuttling associatively between a few old obsessions, they attain claustrophobic beauty that sounds like nobody else. One poem in particular stands out, "Trying To Sleep," a catalogue of ancient, inadvertent cruelties:

         I got my genius brother a summer job in the mills and he stayed all his life. I lived with a woman four
years who went crazy later, escaped from the hospital,
hitchhiked across America terrified and in the snow
without a coat, and was raped by most men who gave her
a ride. I crank my heart even so and it turns over.

"The day's vanity, and the night's remorse," writes Yeats. This is a poem about the moral consequences of vanity: a remorseful "I-Did-This-I-Did-That" poem, and I don't know anybody who's written a better one. The litany won't slow to rank or sort old wickedness: "without a coat" runs right up against "she was raped," as though the two were comparable, or a coat might have protected her.

In all wisdom literature, Proverbs through Blake through Kerouac, the sage speaks beguilingly, in paradoxes and figures. The primary hazard of this sort of thing is that, well, it's bound to attract the ladies. And so we meet Gilbert the cruiser, the side of him that says things like "The reason we cannot enter the same woman/twice is not because the mesh of energy flexes " or who remembers, about a nameless lover, "the way she tore open/the barbecued chicken with her hands,/and wiped the grease on her breasts." It takes an awful lot of wisdom to get away with saying things like that, and for me, I'm afraid, the scripture gets lost in the swagger.

— Dan Chiasson