Azure Blues

Laurence Steven is Chairman of the English Department at Laurentian
University and author of Dissociation and Wholeness in Patrick White’s
Fiction.

Azure Blues presents 159 pages of Gilbert’s particular brand of
poetry—and that’s too many. What do we have? Word play? Yes, here
are some titles— “Absotively posilute”; “Idle Idol Idyl”; and
“Identity Floss”—and some lines—“hair do what hair does”;
“rather an acrobat / than an actor be”; and “a world can turn on
the page / a page can turn on the world.” What else? A stereotypical,
aging, dissolute, romantic poet/rebel? Yes: “i don’t have eighteen
million dollars / but the commonwealth rulers are in town anyway / so
there i am at pender & burrard / giving the motorcade the leather finger
/ on behalf of the common poverty / proud & tall / toothpick in my teeth
/ the language / & it shows” (“Or”).

This is late-night, jazz-club, boozy, coffee-and-cigarettes,
morning-after, more-cigarettes, park-bench, raspy-throat, aching-bones
poetry. Perhaps as such it should be no surprise that it is also
unfinished. Gilbert writes too quickly, it seems; the poems are for the
most part groups of lines, glances, bons mots, which probably felt right
at the time, but don’t hold up well in print. There is little sense of
a depth of either thought or feeling—and thus little, finally, to hold
the reader’s interest. Gilbert assures us that our “listening
creates these poems / as truly as the writing gives them voice //
there’s ghosts in them there words.” He’s right; there are ghosts
in words. But it takes more than assertion, or even polite request, to
get people to listen to them. There must be a sense that the voices
calling us, the ghosts inhabiting the poetry, are worth our time.
Creativity is hard work for a reader. In the case of Gilbert’s poetry,
to sustain that effort through an entire book is too much to ask.