Craft: Christopher Gilbert

Christopher Gilbert (1949-2007) was a psychotherapist and important poet. He published only one book, A Mutual Landscape, which was selected by Michael S. Harper for the Walt Whitman Award in 1983. A Mutual Landscape, and a subsequent book, Christopher Gilbert: An Improvisation, appeared together as Turning into Dwelling in 2015 (via Graywolf’s Re/View series).

Gilbert’s poems demonstrate a psychological awareness (unsurprising, given Gilbert’s profession) where the inner world is often expressed physically. What is in there is felt in the body: he had music and vision, and his poems feel expressionistic as well as impressionistic. His subjects, too, demanded a language all his own: the dead, the spaces between us and them, and how the dead extend the living and vice-versa. Everything he wrote was written with courage, or as he said: “each moment is a boundary I will throw this bridge across.”

Gilbert died young at 57 of polycystic kidney disease, which was inherited. He grew up in Lansing, Michigan, where his parents worked in General Motors assembly plants. He studied as an undergraduate with Robert Hayden at the University of Michigan, and received an MA in psychology from Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, but lived most of his adult life in Providence, Rhode Island. By the early ‘90s he was a psychology professor at Bristol Community College in Fall River, Massachusetts, where he remained until his death.