Refusing Heaven
The 2005 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry went to Jack Gilbert's Refusing Heaven, a collection of poems.
Work Information
A late collection marked by quiet intensity and emotional clarity.
The Los Angeles Times honored the collection in Poetry. It gathers late poems by Jack Gilbert, whose voice is spare and emotionally charged.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Knopf
- Published
- 2005-03-08
- Pages
- 112 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 15.37 x 1.6 x 22.07 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9781400043651
- ISBN-10
- 1400043654
- Price
- 10933 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Poetry/American
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.
Jack Gilbert was born in Pittsburgh. He is the author of The Great Fires: Poems 1982—1992 ; Monolithos , which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and Views of Jeopardy , the 1962 winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize. He has also published a limited edition of elegiac poems under the title Kochan . The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, Gilbert lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.
Reviews
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Elegant and vivid, the poems stayed with me long after initially reading (or meeting) them. I love the crisp yet lyrical feel of his poems - they change your life in such a short space of time. Like others have pointed out, "Failing and Flying" is beautiful. "Music Is in the Piano Only When It Is Played" has also become an old friend. It begins: We are not one with this world. We are not the complexity our body is, nor the summer air idling in the big maple without purpose. We are a shape the wind makes in these leaves as it passes through. We are not the wood any more than the fire, but the heat which is a marriage between the two. We are certainly not the lake nor the fish in it, but the something that is pleased by them. We are the stillness when a mighty Mediterranean noon subtracts even the voices of insects by the broken farmhouse. We are evident when the orchestra plays, and yet are not part of the strings or brass. Like the song that exists only in the singing, and is not the singer.
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Poems that are ephemeral but have emotional substance.
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Jack Gilbert is one of the great poetic voices of our time. Refusing Heaven is a National Book Critics Circle Award winner. Although his poetry is quite masculine in tone, it also courts feminine interest by opening the male soul for female scrutiny. Lines such as, "The spirit cherishes the disregarded," make me cherish the entirety of this collection.
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OK
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Excellent