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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
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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: รฏยฟยฝThe days and nights wasted . . . Long hot afternoons / watching ants while the cicadas railed / in the Chinese elm about the brevity of life.รฏยฟยฝ Time slows down in these poems, as Gilbert creates an aura of curiosity and wonder at the fact of existence itself. Despite powerful intermittent griefsรฏยฟยฝover the women he has parted from or the one lost to cancer (an experience he captures with intimate precision)รฏยฟยฝGilbertรฏยฟยฝs choice in this volume is to รฏยฟยฝrefuse heaven.รฏยฟยฝ 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.
 Media BuzzAll Things Considered - April 30, 2006
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