THE RASHOMON SYNDROME

The latest volume by octogenarian Gillian—who published her first book at age 68—is a quiet, meditative consideration of the elements of daily life, rendered into verse through a process of recollection equally sentimental and literary. Gillian’s great strength is her ability to make use of the imagery of events (the execution of Anne Boleyn, a VE commemoration in Holland) to carry the emotional freight that most modern poets load onto external objects or internal perceptions. Although Gillian’s poems are not without significant props—a piece of embroidery, a Spanish bracelet, a pair of chopsticks—these are often mere associations with some event in the fore of the narrator’s consciousness, and they usually set off a chain reaction of nostalgia that is (in emotional terms) both obvious and quite pure. This is memory verse above all, but the memories, appearing in the guise of a chronicle, are recorded with a sense of fidelity to the past, rather than to any joy or sorrow felt in its wake. The effect is neither cloying nor lugubrious, and it gives off the overwhelming scent of anticipation, of eager expectancy, that the young can rarely feel, much less invoke. —December weather can change in a moment,— Gillian writes. Her voice is beyond bravery or regret: It manages, with profound and comprehensible wisdom, to approach death with simple clarity.