Poetry is the only means we have of talking about experience without diminishing it, and Gilbert diminishes nothing and illuminates everything: the struggles and hopes of ancestors, the care for a dying mother, desire's wide spectrum of joy and loss from childhood to mature womanhood. In a phrase, the too muchness of life.   In “Morning Glories on the Day of Atonement,” she says, “I have rejected the Laws,/ but can't live free of their shadow.” If a shadow, then nevertheless a paradoxically luminous one, for that is the strange beauty and power of Gilbert's poems—in effect, to enlighten in the fullest possible sense. Such poetry is the rarest kind, and I am thankful to rediscover it in Something to Exchange.

—B.H. Fairchild

“I can't see with an angel's sight,” Celia Gilbert writes, but she can see with the clear vision of a poet who knows both love and loss and continues to make—to embrace—that costly exchange. These poems give us the natural world in stunning beauty and history in all its inconsolable grief. Here, too, is the family in its many layers and dimensions forming a rich portrait of what it means to be human—all through the generous, attentive eye of a poet, one, indeed, who is “among the fortunate with something to exchange.”

— Betsy Sholl

 

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Celia Gilbert has published three books of poetry: An Ark of Sorts , winner of the first Jane Kenyon Chapbook Award; Bonfire ; and Queen of Darkness. A bi-lingual collection of her poetry is forthcoming in Poland. Her poetry has appeared in Poetry , Southwest Review , Field , and The New Yorker , among other places, and her work has been frequently anthologized. She is the winner of a Discovery Award and a Pushcart Prize. The Poetry Society of America awarded her an Emily Dickinson Prize and a Consuelo Ford Award. She worked as Poetry and Fiction Editor and feature writer for The Boston Phoenix and helped edit Women/Poems . A printmaker and painter as well as a poet, Gilbert grew up in Washington, D.C. After living abroad in England and France, she now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.