Works by
Jack Gilbert
(Poet)
[1925 - ]

Poetry

• Tough Heaven: Poems of Pittsburgh (2006)
  For the first time in one book, Jack Gilbert's poems of Pittsburgh may be read together, showing a continuity of feeling and theme over five decades. The beauty and severity, the lushness and irresistible power that is Pittsburgh runs through these poems by way of Mr. Gilbert's distinctive poetic manner of absolute authenticity. They show, time and again, the stamp of place on the body and soul of one of America's truly genuine poets. This small collection, a limited edition, will be seen in the coming years as indispensable to lovers of Jack Gilbert's poetry.

• Transgressions: Selected Poems (UK, 2006)
  Jack Gilbert is a major figure in American poetry, but has always been a total outsider, defiantly unfashionable and publishing only four books in five decades. Initially associated with the Beats, he left America after winning the Yale Younger Poets Prize with "Views of Jeopardy" in 1962, eking out a living for many years on Greek islands. His second collection, Monolithos, appeared twenty years later in 1982, but he made his strongest impression on American readers with the late work published in his last two books, The Great Fires (1994) and Refusing Heaven (2005), winner of the prestigious National Book Critics Circle Award.

• Refusing Heaven (2005)
  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.

• Kochan(1984)
  A limited edition chapbook of nine poems, two of which were later republished in The Great Fires: Poems 1982-1992; seven of the poems have not been otherwise published, including "Nights and Four Thousand Mornings," the longest poem Gilbert has published

• The Great Fires: Poems 1982-1992 (1994)
  Joyce's Motto has had much fame but few apostles. Among them, there has been Jack Gilbert and his orthodoxy, a strictness that has required of this poet, now in the seventh decade of his severe life, the penalty of his having had almost no fame at all. In an era that puts before the artist so many sleek and official temptations, keeping unflinchingly to a code of "silence, exile, and cunning" could not have been managed without a show of strictness well beyond the reach of the theater of the coy.
  
  The "far, stubborn, disastrous" course of Jack Gilbert's resolute journey--not one that would promise in time to bring him home to the consolations of Penelope and the comforts of Ithaca but one that would instead take him ever outward to the impossible blankness of the desert--could never have been achieved in the society of others. What has kept this great poet brave has been the difficult company of his poems--and now we have, in Gilbert's third and most silent book, what may be, what must be, the bravest of these imperial accomplishments.

• Monolithos Poems, 1962 and 1982 (1982) -- Winner Stanley Kunitz Prize; Winner American Poetry Review Prize; Nominated as a nominated finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1983, the American Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1982.[1]

• Views of Jeopardy (1962) -- Winner Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition; Nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in Poetry in 1962.

Other

• Genesis West No.1 (1962)
  Celebration of Jack Gilbert's poetry.

See also: