But in Gay's case, it's a motley- and to me, somewhat inspiring- set of obscure and maybe doable journals: Solstice, Gabby, Exit 7, Nashville Review, Bombay Gin, Oversound, etc.Īs for the poems, I found myself engaged at the outset but lost some interest as the book went on. Often, it's a depressing exercise as I see a litany of top-drawer publications-the stuff of my rejections file. I want to know where these have seen the light of published day. Gay mostly writes long, strung-out single-stanza poems, often with lines that consist of 2-6 words.īut back to the ritual. Doesn't seem enough to flesh out a full book of poetry (this is not a chapbook), but once you enter, the mystery is solved. First, I count the number of poems in the collection. I have a little ritual I go through before I read a book of poetry. What this screaming and reaching and dancing No duh child in my dreams, what do you think
Holding my hand, pointing at the roiling sea and the sky Which is precisely what the child in my dream said, Gay's enthusiasm is contagious, his writing is beautiful and often funny, and his joy and delight come through loud and clear, perhaps nowhere more so than in the title poem, where Gay tries, but not very hard, to keep a lid on the "excitability" that informs his entire life. (Sure it didn't.) But what you mostly have here are a lot of poems about paying attention to, and embracing, the world around you, particularly the natural world. Uh, not that that happened to me or anything. You could be reading along happily, smiling at Gay's loving tribute to his next-door neighbor, only to unexpectedly find yourself sobbing.
Probably one of the most noteworthy things about Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude is that most of these poems are several pages long, and they often start out being about one thing and then pivot somewhere in the middle, revealing they're actually about something else instead of, or in addition to, what you'd thought they were about.
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