Christopher Gilbert's poetry collection Turning into Dwelling is part of the Graywolf Poetry Re/View series edited by Mark Doty, which brings essential books of contemporary American poetry back into print. This edition includes Gilbert's only published collection, the Walt Whitman Award-winning Across the Mutual Landscape (1984), plus an unpublished manuscript he finished shortly before his death in 2007.
In his penetrating introduction, Terrance Hayes describes Gilbert as an formalist, a jazzman, a bluesman. He was born in Alabama but moved early on to Lansing, Mich., "tribal families driven north/ to neighborhoods stacked like boxes," the radio "air waves politely segregated." He wanted to work in an "honest groove." As a psychotherapist who taught psychology, Gilbert found time to write poetry "between breaths" (quoted in Contemporary Authors Online).
His poetry often wrestles with the burden of fraught racial markers: "the anguish of my Black block rises up in me/ like a grief. My only chance to go beyond... is to speak up for the public which has birthed me." In "The 'The,' " he writes, "Walking home I am a/ you you you you you, a/ bad dream" who encounters "a ghost hand from a man/ who says he's Lazarus,/ who quotes Langston Hughes, whose black/ body is so black it's pre-/ African, it's purple, it's bruise/ set on a set of bones." Overlooked by society and many other poets (even Hayes didn't know his work at first), this collection resuscitates a previously quiet black poetic voice whose time has surely come. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher