Discovering Jack Gilbert

My intro poetry professor told me I should check out Jack Gilbert's The Great Fires. I happened to find it among my mother's stash of poetry books, and I'm so glad I did. Here is a beautiful sample of Gilbert's work from the collection:

Married

I came back from the funeral and crawled

around the apartment, crying hard,

searching for my wife's hair.

For two months got them from the drain,

from the vacuum cleaner, under the refrigerator,

and off the clothes in the closet.

But after another Japanese woman came,

there was no way to be sure which were

hers, and I stopped. A year later,

repotting Michiko's avocado, I find

a long black hair tangled in the dirt.

Jack Gilbert's profile on Poets.org