Naming the Wind

“What is the tone of your life?”
“Tone, Jack?”
He puts together more words than I’ve heard from him in
     weeks. 
“Desperate, deep, fearful, courageous?”
“Yes, Jack, all of them.”

In “The Old Man Asks What Is Beyond Contentment” from Steven Rood’s Naming the Wind, “Jack” is the poet Jack Gilbert (1925–2012), both an inquisitive mentor and the subject of sixteen poems in this collection. Writing before Gilbert’s death, Rood declares him “the greatest living American poet,” whose style of passionate forthrightness clearly influences these poems. Rood writes piercingly of his friend’s decline (“dementia continually shoves clay / down his throat”) and describes Gilbert in ways that recall, in other poems, Rood’s own family: how Rood teaches his son “to exceed me,” just as Gilbert seeks a “more deep” artistry for Rood; how both Rood’s dying mother and Gilbert open their mouths like baby birds when he feeds them, respectively, morphine and cake.

Setting aside the wisdom of any self-respecting poet granting such influence (“I’m Jack’s son,” Rood tells the gatekeepers at Gilbert’s nursing home), how does Rood, a septuagenarian attorney publishing his first poetry book, become his own poet? Naming the Wind answers, in part, through the equanimity that faith and contemplation bestow:

Sixty-seven-and-four-months, I discovered I was invisible,
as the Talmud taught, so I began to understand
I might be only background to the world of people.
Now, at seventy-two, I begin to ask myself, Is my life a
     success? 

What makes Rood’s work his own is not only the charming belatedness of such a question but his engagement with Jewishness (“The dybbuk hands me fate”), his excavations of memory’s “stubborn ruin,” and his close, transformative observations of the world, as in “Encounter”:

The newt is velvety burnt umber with an orange belly 
and small, fine hands. She treads on leaf-litter
toward any puddle or pool.
She has neither skin-toxins nor speed,
only the color of autumn leaves.
She crawls onto the back of my hand, tickling. 
I turn from solid to liquid.