The Gatehouse Heaven
By James Kimbrell

Winner of the 1997 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry

"Kimbrell sings a serious song. . . . The poems are deft and sure, there is a sense of vision in them and I have the feeling that this is the start of something significant. And if, as Flaubert said, language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity, then the stars have prime seating for these songs."

—from the Foreword by Charles Wright

"By turns plain and ornate, literal-minded and highly stylized, Kimbrell's poems mediate the claims of dream and memoir, romantic vision and drab reality, the sacred and the profane. Burdened by familial loss and spiritual anxiety, these poised but troubled poems enact a search for an enabling vehicle and a just distance from painful experience."

—Poetry

"Often inspired by the landscape of the South, Kimbrell soon makes clear his preference for 'the view above ourselves,' his desire to see from the perspective of the stars. 'Mt. Pisgah' beautifully evokes a country scene of a 'beam bridge/Above the snake-thick waters,' and 'A Greeting' takes the poet back inside a southern mansion where, as a child, he joined a séance. At the same time, 'Self-Portrait, Leakesville' suggests the need to leave behind his rural past, and a group of poems set in South Korea nicely answers that call. Other childhood episodes occasion charming poems: playing hooky to sit atop a horse in a barn; a night of wonderful passion with a 'rebellious Pentecostal daughter,' and his lust as a teenaged stock clerk for a comely married customer. At the heart of the volume is the long title sequence about the poet's father, a mentally disturbed bricklayer, whose stays in the asylum lead to lots of familial discord and eventual divorce, but most of all to utter helplessness on the poet's part. Seeing him years later, with his voice box removed, Kimbrell dwells in the silences between them, the same silences that pervade a failed relationship. Strong work by a poet of much promise."

—Kirkus Reviews

In his debut collection, James Kimbrell demonstrates the power of lyric language to reconfigure memory. The title section of the book, a poignant ten part poem, portrays a son’s lifelong struggle to connect with a father made absent by mental and physical illness: "It's quite/The wonder, what madness can do for a man,//Much more than me far below the harsh light of heaven/Down here, in the make-shift center of this world." The book serves as testament and guide to the kind of love that lies beyond anger. Equipped with the rich imagination of a painter and a poet's love of language, Kimbrell revisits the mysterious landscapes of childhood and returns with poems that fathom meaning yet retain a sense of awe.

James Kimbrell was born in Jackson, Mississippi in 1967. He is the author of a volume of poems, The Gatehouse Heaven (Sarabande, 1998), and co-translater (with Yu Jung-yul) of Three Poets of Modern Korea: Yi Sang, Hahm Dong-seon, and Choi Young-mi (Sarabande, 2002). He has been the recipient of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, a "Discovery"/The Nation Award, Poetry magazine's Bess Hokin Award, a Whiting Writers' Award, and has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. His work has been included in the Bread Loaf Anthology of New American Poets (University Press of New England, 2000), American Poetry: The Next Generation (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2000) and Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (Sarabande Books, 2005). He is a graduate of Millsaps College, the University of Southern Mississippi, the University of Virginia, and the University of Missouri, Columbia, and is currently the director of the creative writing program at Florida State University.