Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (2015) is a personal and different kind of catalog directed at finding and understanding the joy arising from the mundane. Read our review of it below.
Ross Gay’s book Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (2015) is a collection of poems that explore the poetry of every day and weaves a sense of joy and gratitude into them. It is instantly telling of the extraordinariness of the mundane and the purposes of the humble.
The title of the book itself strikes as a welcome invitation, and the absence of an article in the title highlights how expansive, personal and different this catalog could be re-imagined by the reader. I find myself going back to this book again and again to remind myself (on especially hard days) that joy can be found everywhere provided there is a sense of gratitude even for most little things.
Ross Gay is an American poet, essayist and teacher. He currently teaches poetry at Indiana University and the low-residency MFA program at Drew University. His books include Inciting Joy (2022), Be Holding (2020), Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (2015), Bringing the Shovel Down (2011), and Against Which (2006). His honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Cave Canem and Bread Loaf Writers Conference.
About the Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (2015)
The 24 poems in the book talk about body positivity, nature, objects, and daily actions that go unnoticed and serve to point towards the wonder hidden in them if only one pauses enough to experience them truly. The poet builds an immersive universe of figs, buttons, flute, spoon, armpit, mulberry tree, and fertiliser that deftly marries nature with domestic life and also gives us a glimpse of what is personal to the poet whilst evoking images that are true to the reader in that context.
Where do you go to find joy?
One of the main reasons I picked up this book is because the first thing that struck me when I went on his website was “Ross Gay is interested in joy.” That sentence stayed with me. I remember thinking to myself, “hmm? Shouldn’t we all be interested in joy? And for me, that was such a profound moment (the fact that joy is an active choice, one that you must decide to dwell in, be curious about, one that you must invite in) that the next time I was in a bookstore, this book was what I picked.
Most of the poems in the book have momentum, in part due to the short lines and lack of punctuation. The line breaks are abrupt, but the reader’s instinct is to keep reading without pause. There is a verticality that propels the reader from one image to another. The five odes in this collection are about deceptively simple things, three out of which are about mundane actions like “buttoning and unbuttoning my shirt”, “drinking water from my hands”, and “sleeping in my clothes” which talks about the possibility of finding contentment and happiness in the seemingly quiet often unnoticed moments in life.
The poems are meditative, as can be seen from the lines of the ode to the flute :
“a man
sings by opening
his lungs by
turning himself into air”
and sometimes lyrical and fun, like the lines from patience
“call it sloth; call it sleaze;
call it bummery if you please;
i’ll call it patience;
i’ll call it joy, this,”
So, in a way, the book can serve as a personal guide to what your kind of joy looks and feels like. What are those seemingly quotidian activities that you indulge in that sustain you in a joyous way? Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude tries to draw the reader’s focus on those very moments.
Also Read: “On the Beach at Night” by Walt Whitman: A Poem in Free Verse
Where does joy spark from?
While reading this book, I thought at length about the first time I had felt joy, like a blinding bright light kind of joy, and my memory landed on what seems like an almost ancient memory of my three or four-year-old self looking through a red kaleidoscope and watching shapes take form, feeling a sense of roiling happiness in my stomach while experiencing this visual magic for the first time. This brings me to my understanding of joy as a precursor to loss and an aftermath of grief.
The poet acknowledges that which sparks gratitude – loss. In the poem burial, the poet talks about using his father’s ashes as fertilizer and the wonder of him living on as the life force of a tree. In that sense, these poems are live things that move, sing, flutter and dance as the reader goes through them.
The centre-piece of the collection is a long poem of the same title as the book that addresses the reader directly, calls them friends, invites them with –
my gratitude, which includes, dear reader,
you, for staying here with me,
for moving your lips just so as I speak.
Here is a cup of tea. I have spooned honey into it.
– and takes them on a journey of profuse gratitude, all the while guiding the reader’s attention towards the wonderful workings of nature and life. The reader is shown the wisdom in birdsong, the purpose in hauling tons of cow shit, the mysteries of life & death and how it serves us, urban kindnesses, grace in the aftermath of a crime, dealing with the demands of love, the beauty in history and the wisdom of nature.
The poem mimics a full life which starts in wide-eyed wonderment and then moves on to signal towards a boyhood shovelling shit from which grows tall trees, and a realisation sets in about how hard work bears fruit. It then moves on to tackle topics of battling mental illnesses, themes of survival and death as experienced by a young adult, finding love and exploring sexuality, witnessing the external world while contemplating the blessings of ancestors and the importance of history.
This titular poem serves to acknowledge how everything is connected, how a guitar cannot exist without a tree, and the tree cannot exist without the people who planted it and how the seed must be thanked, just like the person who carried the seed in their braids from far-off continents. Finally, the poet thanks himself and the readers, a motif that repeatedly comes up in his work, as one cannot exist without the other.
Why Should You Read Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude
Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude is that poetry collection that comes around once in a great while with its simple verse but profound wisdom. It shows you the way to finding joy and serves to tell you that what you need most to heal yourself, to pull apart grief’s hold of you finger by finger, is right here, hidden in plain sight, all the while with and around you. I think this is a book for all ages with the power to offer the reader a way to weather life as we know it and even make light of it. I definitely recommend this as a must-have in a collection to be whipped out on days you need it most.
