Spare, deeply sad, built upon death and yet fully engaged with the embrace of living, these poems approach the indispensible. Highly recommended.

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Product Description

A third collection of poems by a writer who has been honored by the Lannan Foundation encompasses more than three decades of work and considers such themes as confronting the inner self and savage compassion. Reprint.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #125774 in Books
• Published on: 1996-02-13
• Released on: 1996-02-13
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 112 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780679747673
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Review
1953
Adulterated
Almost Happy
Alone
Alternatives
Betrothed
Between Aging And Old
Beyond Beginnigs
Carrying Torches At Noon
Chastity
Conceiving Himself
The Container For The Thing Contained
Dante Dancing
Eating With The Emperor
The Edge Of The World
Exceeding
Explicating The Twilight
Factoring
Finding Eurydice
Finding Something
First Times
The Forgotten Dialect Of The Heart
From These Nettles, Alms
Getting It All
Getting Old
A Ghost Sings, A Door Opens
Ghosts
Gift Horses
Going There
Going Wrong
The Great Fires
Guilty
Half The Truth
Hard Wired
Harm And Boon In The Meetings
Haunted Importantly
Highlights And Interstices
The History Of Men
Hot Nights In Florida
How To Love The Dead
I Imagine The Gods
In Umbria
Infidelity
Leporello On Don Giovanni
The Lives Of Famous Men
Looking Away From Longing
The Lord Sits With Me Out In Front
Man At A Window
Married
Me And Capablanca
Measuring The Tyger
Michiko Dead
Michiko Nogami (1946-1982)
The Milk Of Paradise
Moment Of Grace
Music Is The Memory Of What Never Happened
Night Songs And Day Songs
Older Women
On Stone
Peaches
Playing House
Prospero Dreams Of Arnaud Daniel Inventing Love 12th Century
Prospero On The Mountain Gathering Wood (2)
Prospero Without His Magic
Recovering Amid The Farms
Relative Pitch
Respect
Ruins And Wabi
Scheming In The Snow
Searching For Pittsburgh
Sonatina
The Spirit And The Soul
Steel Guitars
A Stubborn Ode
Tasters For The Lord
Tear It Down
Theoretical Lives
Thinking About Ecstasy
To See If Something Comes Next
Trying To Have Something Left Over
Voices Inside And Out
What Is There To Say?
The White Heart Of God
A Year Later
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

From the Inside Flap
JOYCE'S MOTTO has had much fame but few apostles. Among them, there has been Jack Gilbert and his orthodoxy, a strictness that has required of this poet, now in the seventh decade of his severe life, the penalty of his having had almost no fame at all. In an era that puts before the artist so many sleek and official temptations, keeping unflinchingly to a code of "silence, exile, and cunning" could not have been managed without a show of strictness well beyond the reach of the theater of the coy.

The "far, stubborn, disastrous" course of Jack Gilbert's resolute journey--not one that would promise in time to bring him home to the consolations of Penelope and the comforts of Ithaca but one that would instead take him ever outward to the impossible blankness of the desert--could never have been achieved in the society of others. What has kept this great poet brave has been the difficult company of his poems--and now we have, in Gilbert's third and most silent book, what may be, what must be, the bravest of these imperial accomplishments.

 

About the Author
Jack Gilbert was born in Pittsburgh. He has published Views of Jeopardy, the 1962 winner of the Yale Younger Poets Series, and Monolithos. Both books were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. A third volume, elegiac poems, was bought out, in a limited edition, under the title Kochan. Mr. Gilbert has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

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Customer Reviews

A Poet to Keep on The Narrowest Bookshelf
I recently moved house and had to consider carefully which books to take with me for a time abroad. I'd have to pay for the weight I carried. I eventually took Gilbert as one of my only poets. I also took the short stories of Hawthorne. Both are spare metaphysicians with a sense of humor. I don't go six months without picking up this book and reading something in it. Very few poets can stand up to that kind of revisiting. Bleak humour and refusal to be falsely comforted. An eye for what you may remember at the end of your life.

Many of these are poems about women - wives and how he came to leave them, lovers and how they came to die and how he mourned, a young married mother whose baby he threw in the air and murmured PITTSBURGH to in between their trysts. Short, tender, very emotional poems from a man discinclined to easy emotion or postures. Poems to read at difficult junctures in your life and get perspective from. And, finally, poems with a great reach of ambition unusual nowadays in American verse. Poems that claim to talk to God, or at least sit with him for a while on the front porch.

Eventually Amazing
Jack Gilbert's was the first book of poetry I ever bought. Countless purchases, and a decade later, it's still the book I reopen on the eventual tired or tormented nights.

A few of the poems are instant favorites. For me, many of the others grew slowly over the years, so that, some random night, when the poem finally hit me I felt as if I was holding an entirely new book in my hands.

The poetry is largely heavy. But there is a hope, a conviction, a courage, or something warming glancing out that will keep you, too, coming back to old pages. This is a purchase you will not regret.

Gilbert's work will endure.
T.S.Eliot once said that many of the most successful writers have published either a lot or very little. Gilbert has chosen the later strategy. Like Cavafy, he has been scrupulous about giving the reader only the very best and most carefully crafted writing from his desk. The result is a small but extremely distinguished body of work that should be remembered as among the best of his generation. Buy this book. Read it closely. The poems will make you strong.