Creative Capital

Description

Late in the Antenna Fields combines an interest in the grotesque and the absurd with a documentary approach focusing on everyday life, saturated as it is by a culture of spectacle, war, commodities and consumption of various sorts. Gilbert aims for his poems to work concurrently on at least four levels—the personal, the social, the political and the linguistic—while weaving these elements together in a way that allows for each of them to be given different inflections and degrees of emphasis. Autobiographical elements sporadically surface; at other times, descriptive content and commentary drawn from society and culture are foregrounded—all of it interspersed with moments of linguistic play. While his poems are occasionally fantastical, Gilbert sees them as a form of realism layering past, present and future encounters with flickering images, ephemeral objects and fragile hopes.