Sheet Music by Robert Gibb, and: Strange Nursery by Esther Schor (review)

I need to warn that what follows is an unabashedly enthusiastic review of recent collections by two very different poets whose work I admire a great deal. These collections, not coincidentally, demonstrate how poetry participates—if we let it do so—in a remarkably liberating and productive relationship with our reading and responding selves. Both collections are steeped in what I like to call "cultural context." In other words, these collections resonate with echoes of, and allusions to, our collective cultural experience and heritage (including the heritage of all the arts) on one hand, and to each poet's intense but aesthetically mediated experience of the private and personal music of life on the other.

The virtuosity of Robert Gibb's new collection, Sheet Music, is quickly evident in its striking trompe l'oiel cover. Sheet music provides a musical blueprint from which musicians perform in time and space, much as actors realize a dramatic script, an audibilizing process that is unavoidably idiosyncratic because of all the human variables involved. Indeed, the title of Gibb's collection is a bit more accurately represented like this: "SHEET MUSIC: poems," because the poems in Sheet Music are not just "about" music but also about themselves, metaphorically re-presenting the innate musicality of both their forms and their content.

In a sense, the poems in Sheet Music instruct us how to "perform" them as we read. Consider, for example, carefully shaped forms like those in "Gonna Die with a Hammer in My Hand," which pit their regular and symmetrical stanzas against a "content" that wants, like life, to go its own way, formal structures notwithstanding, replicating a performative tension familiar to musicologists and musicians alike:

I heard it first during the folk revival,    The Williamson Brothers and Curry        With their version of "John Henry,"

That high ethyl edge to their voices    Where the notes frayed off into time,        The failure of the early acetates

To fully capture the music they miked.

From this sharply imaged riff on a classic folk ballad, Gibb moves us seamlessly in the next poem to "The Modern Jazz Quartet in Concert: Carnegie Music Hall, Pittsburgh, 1964," which looks at first glance like a Petrarchan sonnet and reads like a bluesy concert note meant to accompany the MJQ's performance of the classic "Django" the poem describes. That title in turn is a nod to the brilliant gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt, who with his pal Stéphane Grapelli took ensemble jazz where it had not been before, in Paris or elsewhere. Reading, we hear the music, perform it along with Milt Jackson and Company but also with Gibb, who transcribes and arranges it for us:

And now the first notes spilling from the vibes untilThe whole ensemble's shimmering preciselyAbout the beat, the music finds that statelyWeave with which it might carry us allFrom march to strut to mortal frolic, cakewalkingOur little way in the huge and acoustic dark.

They are all here in these richly elegiac poems, it seems, the echoes of their sounds, their souls, hanging in that "huge and acoustic dark": Sonny Rollins, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, and Bud Powell rubbing shoulders with Delius and Auden and Rilke, who appear in other related poems. Gibb captures their art, repurposing its essence in skillful verbal tapestries in which we find ourselves everywhere in the stitches. Elsewhere, we encounter everything from Beethoven's Ninth and The Afternoon of the Faun (with its "a" altered to "the," perhaps to jolt us away from only Mallarmé and Nijinsky and Debussy) to Icarus (in Pittsburgh's Frick Park, no less) to the inscrutable creatures of the Pittsburgh Zoo and Aquarium. A sense of reanimation is at work here, especially toward the end, of going beyond the mere personal or cultural memory invoked by the artifacts and somehow "bringing back" (as in "revivifying") the thing itself, alive again.

The collection culminates with the remarkable "Ghost Sonata" (alluding, perhaps, to August Strindberg). The poem...