In the epigraph to his second collection of poems, Monolithos, Jack Gilbert writes:

Monolithos means single stone, and refers to the small hill behind our house. This hill gives the place where we lived its name. It is also the tip of a solid stone island buried in debris when most of Thíra blew apart 3,500 years ago.

Though rooted in the landscape of Greece, Gilbert’s poems swim through the cavernous rooms of memory, recording the inscape of a private life intoxicated by abundance and swallowed by grief. Over the years, Gilbert has acquired a near-mythic reputation: after winning the 1962 Yale Series of Younger Poets with Views of Jeopardy, he concluded an illustrious victory tour by disappearing abroad for the next twenty years. In 1982, he reemerged to publish Monolithos; then in 1995, The Great Fires appeared, his last collection to date. The Great Fires may well be the richest, most masterful collection of his somewhat clandestine career, giving testament to the silences that spawn artistic creation. In effect, the spaces between his collections are works of art themselves; one has the sense that his periods of silence are not vacuums, but momentous acts of spiritual reawakening, of revival to the necessary joys and sorrows that accompany the most inward life.

Divided into two sections, the first including poems from Views of Jeopardy, and the second a selection of new poems, Monolithos displays the markings of Gilbert’s earlier rigorous use of language, while developing the subjects and themes of his later work. Yet while The Great Fires is imbued with an austere clarity, a blinding simplicity in its even tone and perfunctory syntax, Monolithos is steeped in shadowy grammar and ornately wrought lines. In "That Tenor of Which the Night Birds Are a Vehicle," for instance, Gilbert mesmerizes through the oddity of language: "Birds who are vast cloud-chambers of the place I am in / in my bright condition, a neighborhood I am the darkness of."

Elsewhere, Gilbert’s compacts language into luminous marble; the simultaneous effects of density and lightness are starkly, acutely present, as in "The Whiteness, the Sound and Alcibiades":

In Latium, years ago,
I sat by the road watching
an ox come through the day.
Stark-white in the distance.
Occasionally under a tree.
Colorless in the heavy sun.
Suave in the bright shadows.
Starch-white near in the glare.
Petal-white near in the shade.
Linen, stone-white, and milk.
Ox-white before me, and past
into the thunder of light.

The poem strikes one as almost a cross between early James Wright and Rilke. Yet even in his early work, Gilbert’s voice is distinctly his own. No matter how enraptured he becomes by the moment of the poem’s making, no matter how unbearable its ecstasy, Gilbert always returns to the immediacy of the earth, though it is his own "earth by language":

For ten years I have tried
to understand about the ox.
About the sound. The whales.
Of love. And arrived here
to give thanks for the profit.
I wake to the wanton freshness.
To the arriving and leaving. To the journey.
I wake to the freshness. And do reverence.