[New-Poetry] Finalists for the Lenore Marshall Prize

[Anthony Lawrence]

The Gilbert line "...anything
worth doing is worth doing badly"
reminds me, in a circuitous way, of Leonard Cohen, talking about his  
friend Irving Layton, who is fond of saying:
"Leonard, are you sure you're doing the wrong thing?"



On 30/08/2006, at 9:18 AM, Richard Wilsnack wrote:

> Christian Barter, The Singers I Prefer (CavanKerry Press)
> Jack Gilbert, Refusing Heaven (Knopf)
> Dorianne Laux, Facts About the Moon (W.W. Norton)
> Eleanor Lerman, Our Post Soviet History Unfolds (Sarabande Press)
> Ron Slate, The Incentive of the Maggot (Mariner Books)
>
> Gilbert looks like the favorite.
>
> Tad Richards
>
> -----------------------------------------------------
>
> For those unfamiliar with Jack Gilbert's poetry,
> here is one of his best, but not a poem for men too young...
>
> Failing and Flying
>
> by Jack Gilbert
>
> Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
> It's the same when love comes to an end,
> or the marriage fails and people say
> they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
> said it would never work. That she was
> old enough to know better. But anything
> worth doing is worth doing badly.
> Like being there by that summer ocean
> on the other side of the island while
> love was fading out of her, the stars
> burning so extravagantly those nights that
> anyone could tell you they would never last.
> Every morning she was asleep in my bed
> like a visitation, the gentleness in her
> like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
> Each afternoon I watched her coming back
> through the hot stony field after swimming,
> the sea light behind her and the huge sky
> on the other side of that. Listened to her
> while we ate lunch. How can they say
> the marriage failed? Like the people who
> came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
> and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
> I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
> but just coming to the end of his triumph.
>
> -------------------------------------------
>
> Richard W. Wilsnack
> rwilsnac at medicine.nodak.edu
>
>
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