Gathered in this volume readers will find more than fifty years of poems by the incomparable Jack Gilbert, from his Yale Younger Poets prize-winning volume to glorious late poems, including a section of previously uncollected work.
There is no one quite like Jack Gilbert in postwar American poetry. After garnering early acclaim with "Views of Jeopardy" (1962), he escaped to Europe and lived apart from the literary establishment, honing his uniquely fierce, declarative style, with its surprising abundance of feeling. He reappeared in our midst with "Monolithos" (1982) and then went underground again until "The Great Fires" (1994), which was eventually followed by "Refusing Heaven" (2005), a prizewinning volume of surpassing joy and sorrow, and the elegiac "The Dance Most of All" (2009). Whether his subject is his boyhood in working-class Pittsburgh, the women he has loved throughout his life, or the bittersweet losses we all face, Gilbert is by turns subtle and majestic: he steals up on the odd moment of grace; he rises to crescendos of emotion. At every turn, he illuminates the basic joys of everyday experience.
Now, for the first time, we have all of Jack Gilbert's work in one essential volume: testament to a stunning career and to his place at the forefront of poetic achievement in our time.

In this "pithy and poignant" ("Booklist") late-in-life collection, the award-winning Jack Gilbert gives us characteristically bold and nuanced poems as he revisits the passions of a lifetime--the women, the places, and the mysterious and lonely offices of poetry itself.

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.

"From the Hardcover edition."

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.