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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: �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.
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