Celia Gilbert

Something to Exchange Celia Gilbert

Poetry. Poetry is the only means we have of talking about experience without diminishing it, and Gilbert diminishes nothing and illuminates everything: the struggles and hopes of ancestors, the care for a dying mother, desire's wide spectrum of joy and loss from childhood to mature womanhood. In a phrase, the too muchness of life. In 'Morning Glories on the Day of Atonement, ' she says, 'I have rejected the Laws, / but can't live free of their shadow.' If a shadow, then nevertheless a paradoxically luminous one, for that is the strange beauty and power of Gilbert's poems--in effect, to enlighten in the fullest possible sense. Such poetry is the rarest kind, and I am thankful to rediscover it in SOMETHING TO EXCHANGE--B. H. Fairchil