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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: Γ―ΒΏΒ½The days and nights wasted . . . Long hot afternoons / watching ants while the cicadas railed / in the Chinese elm about the brevity of life.Γ―ΒΏΒ½ Time slows down in these poems, as Gilbert creates an aura of curiosity and wonder at the fact of existence itself. Despite powerful intermittent griefsΓ―ΒΏΒ½over the women he has parted from or the one lost to cancer (an experience he captures with intimate precision)Γ―ΒΏΒ½GilbertΓ―ΒΏΒ½s choice in this volume is to Γ―ΒΏΒ½refuse heaven.Γ―ΒΏΒ½ 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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