Product Description

More than a decade after Jack Gilbert’s The Great Fires, this highly anticipated new collection shows the continued development of a poet who has remained fierce in his avoidance of the beaten path. In Refusing Heaven, Gilbert writes compellingly about the commingled passion, loneliness, and sometimes surprising happiness of a life spent in luminous understanding of his own blessings and shortcomings: “The days and nights wasted . . . Long hot afternoons / watching ants while the cicadas railed / in the Chinese elm about the brevity of life.” Time slows down in these poems, as Gilbert creates an aura of curiosity and wonder at the fact of existence itself. Despite powerful intermittent griefs–over the women he has parted from or the one lost to cancer (an experience he captures with intimate precision)–Gilbert’s choice in this volume is to “refuse heaven.” He prefers this life, with its struggle and alienation and delight, to any paradise. His work is both a rebellious assertion of the call to clarity and a profound affirmation of the world in all its aspects. It braces the reader in its humanity and heart.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #193792 in Books
• Published on: 2005-03-08
• Released on: 2005-03-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 112 pages

About the Author
Jack Gilbert was born in Pittsburgh. He is the author of The Great Fires: Poems 1982—1992; Monolithos, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and Views of Jeopardy, the 1962 winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize. He has also published a limited edition of elegiac poems under the title Kochan. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, Gilbert lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Customer Reviews

The Forgotten
Gilbert is not a workshop poet, let alone politically correct in any way. He writes to live and not to get tenure. He's overlooked these days; he's old, out of step, and has never published often. Maybe that's the fate of masters who have written poems that can save your life, like this one:

Failing and Flying

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It's the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.

I've read some women critics who are first bothered by his focus on women, as if he used them as stepping stones to God. Most don't. Gilbert's a little like Robert Graves, who found women in all their humanity the heart of a heartless world. He's a poet of sharp-eyed praise. Read him: he may be the last great poet.

Elegant, timeless classic
I am an avid reader of poetry: classical and modern, in English, in translation, in other languages, in collections and magazines, in any form I can find it. Without a doubt, this is one of the finest books of poetry I've ever read, maybe the finest. Each poem is lyrical and elegant - complete in its own right - but the collection also works as a whole. The poems are spare, and for the most part, sad, speaking to love and loss, life, letting go, and holding on. They are classical subjects of poetry, and they manage here, to be both intimate - a seemingly autobiographical look into the author's emotional life - and universal. And somehow, too, they manage to be timeless and vast in their appeal: accessible, I think, to a casual reader of poetry, and yet equally rich for a student of the traditional forms. I devoured this book, reading it in a single sitting lasting late into the night. And then the next day, when I awoke, I read it again. That was a month ago, but the images linger: life altering and life affirming, the essence of great poetry.

Brutality of beauty
Jack Gilbert's "The Abnormal Is Not Courage" has been on my wall for some 25 years -- words to live by. It has been joined by "A Brief for the Defense." Gilbert is a poet who is not afraid of ideas, of hard truths, of inherent conflict. His poems aren't about how to live, but why.