Purchase
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.
Knopf
March 2005
112 pages
ISBN: 1400043654
Hardcover
Add to Wish List
Fiction Poetry
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.
Comments
No comments posted.
Registered users may leave comments.
Log in or register now!
| 
© 2003-2024 off-the-edge.net
all rights reserved Privacy Policy