Refusing Heaven
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Refusing Heaven
More than a decade after Jack Gilbert’sThe 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. InRefusing 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.
Poetry
The New Young American Poets
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The New Young American Poets
This collection of poems by 40 poets born after 1960 includes a diverse range of voices including Sherman Alexie, Joshua Clover, Allison Joseph, Timothy Liu, Matthew Roher, and many others.
Poetry
Wreck of the Thresher & Other Poem
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Wreck of the Thresher & Other Poem
Description not available.
Poetry
Return to the City of White Donkeys
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Return to the City of White Donkeys
In his fourteenth collection of poetry, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner James Tate continues exploring his own peculiar brand of poetry, transforming our everyday world into one where women give birth to wolves, wild babies are found in gardens, and Saint Nick visits on a hot July day. Tate's signature style draws on a marvelous variety of voices and characters, all of which sound vaguely familiar, but are each fantastically unique, brilliant, and eccentric.Yet, as Charles Simic observed inThe New York Review of Books, With all his reliance on chance, Tate has a serious purpose. He's searching for a new way to write a lyric poem. He continues, To write a poem out of nothing at all is Tate's genius. For him, the poem is something one did not know was there until it was written down ... Just about anything can happen next in this kind of poetry and that is its attraction ... Tate is not worried about leaving us a little dazed ... He succeeds in ways for which there are few precedents. He makes me think that anti-poetry is the best friend poetry ever had.
Poetry