Samuel Tongue

And they hadn't had much critical engagement.

He seems to, from my very brief research, he seems to have, over the years that he was writing, he died in 2012,

was kind of ignored by critics but was well lauded in prizes and in the prize-giving culture and loved by readers and poets.

I don't really know what it means to say a poet's poet but with the work that we looked at for Jack Gilbert there was a real sense of a spareness, a directness, a lucidity that can seem simplistic or simple and straightforward but there's depth there which

you know you're in the hands of a really great poet.

So I wanted to, yeah, I wanted to read some Jack Gilbert with friends of the SPL, and that's what we did.

All of the ones that we're going to talk about today, probably two poems today, are all from Jack Gilbert's collection Refusing Heaven in 2005, which is one of his late books.

It seems that he didn't publish very much over his 50-year writing career.

And if you go on the Poetry Foundation's website, you can see that that was part of his shtick, I suppose, that he's not a kind of professional poet that's producing, producing, producing.

He described himself as a farmer of poetry, kind of tending to it, I suppose, and waiting for a harvest.

And that fits with some of the imagery and some of the tone that we'll get from these poems.

So the first poem I wanted to look at and for us to listen to is called Failing and Flying.

Failing and Flying.

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.

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.