With grace and economy

Press, 3 November 1984, Page 22

With grace and economy

Collected Poems. By Ruth Gilbert. Black Robin, 1984. 155 pp. Hardback $22.50, paperback $18.95.

(Reviewed by

Heather McPherson)

Ruth Gilbert’s poetry is distinguished — by its spare and disciplined music and by its sense of having been made in unhurried stillness, a successor to and in the heritage of those timeless anthology poems that held us in stasis a while in hot adolescent classrooms, and even now give us the feeling of stepping a little outside life for the contemplative muse to work her spell. Not that the poems step too far outside. In fact they step so directly into experience that we tremble a little at the danger to the poet of falling into sentimentality. Yet she does not. Poems like “Nativity” and "Still-Born”, if coming out of a less complex consciousness than a younger poet could choose, retain a simple nobility that cannot be dismissed. This directness, though perhaps deriving from, or having an older civilisation in mind, keeps its images in the present: “Shall we Barter this ngaio for an olive tree?” from

“Look-out Point," or in the collection “The Luthier” following the violin-maker with a loving delight in the process, materials, art, product and its singing tones. Some of the disturbing contemporary world shows through in the later “Too Many Storeys High” collection, sdt in New York where small observations capture a city and street life missing from the more insulated earlier collections. Here are the “midnight watchers” being .asked to move on: “Shuffling, unkempt, they do; But no-one asks where to.”; or the New York pub: “a harsh world, yet one/Not quite bereft of love.” And there is the series “To A Black Poet," the beginning of a dialogue whose resolution is stated first: “Blood knows one colour only,/Not black or white, but red.” But ends at the point where faith and suffering are less easily. resolved, in “The Scapegoats,” or in the earlier “Manhood” where the poet can “know you dead, yet cannot take death in.” This is a major collection by a poet who has written consistently well, always with grace and economy and with a positive elevation of the ideals of truth and continuity