Ghost Volcano: Poems

by Sandra M. Gilbert

Here in her beautiful and brilliant new collection, Sandra Gilbert collects the poems she wrote in memory of her husband's unexpected and inexplicable death. "Widow's Walk," the book's centerpiece, charts the poet's journey through the stages of grief, from the bleak moments when her lost love seems massive as a ghost volcano, "dead/and gigantic and frozen in reproach," so that there is "nowhere/you are not, nowhere/you are not not," to the tenuous instant when she realizes that she must "send you forth ... musing and lit with your own past toward the unimaginable ice cliffs, / south of the south."
At the same time, in longer and more formal worksespecially the two ambitious sequences "Notes on Masada" and "Water Music" - Gilbert seeks both to elegize her husband and to understand his death in public, political, and philosophical contexts. Ghost Volcano is a tender, courageous, loving, and ultimately universal account of how we endure grief.

Genres: Poetry

111 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1995

About the author

Sandra M. Gilbert was an American literary critic and poet who published in the fields of feminist literary criticism, feminist theory, and psychoanalytic criticism. She was best known for her collaborative critical work with Susan Gubar, with whom she co-authored, among other works, The Madwoman in the Attic (1979). Madwoman in the Attic is widely recognized as a text central to second-wave feminism. She was Professor Emerita of English at the University of California, Davis.
Gilbert lived in Berkeley, California, and lived, until 2008, in Paris, France. Her husband, Elliot L. Gilbert, was chair of the Department of English at University of California, Davis, until his death in 1991. She also had a long-term relationship with David Gale, mathematician at University of California, Berkeley, until his death in 2008.

Reviews

[Casey Kiser · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent collection of poems written in dealings with grief of sudden death, and memories that plague the mind for better or worse. The poems are beautifully structured, never boring and they reach for you in their struggle. This poem is called ' February 11, 1992: At the Art Institute of Chicago '

The Van Gogh roomscape draws me
with its caked and screaming yellow bed,
and then, two yards away, the bloodied eyes
of his devilish self-portrait-

but I pause, instead, in your honor
(wanting to think only of the you you were)
before {Sunday Afternoon at the Grand Jatte}:
those bourgeois ghosts so primly posed

beside a silent stream,
and I think
how easily I see clear through them,
they're only shadows

with portentous dogs and bustles
whispering across a phantom light
that rises like swamp fever
from the Grand Jatte's golden ground...

My dear one, my other self, you lay
bleeding to death
in a white chaos where they wouldn't
let us see you: tubes and clicking things,

fearful voices of the Code Team-
{trache, pacemaker, transfusions}-
and what brilliance of the past
leaped from the ghastly tiles (did any?)

to recall you to the shadow
life on the Grand Jatte,
how we and Seurat studied for it,
sketching the couple over and over, their

arm-in-arm silence, their odd
placidity, and the trembling
radiance that blurred behind them
as they stood themselves, unconscious,

in an eerie shade a whole lot
scarier than Van Gogh's scream.

[Kyle D. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Came across this book at Midtown Scholar in Harrisburg, PA. It was the first book of poetry I'd ever read, and it was the first poems I felt were accessible to me. I was hooked. This was the book that made me want to be a poet.