The Great Fires: Poems, 1982-1992

Jack Gilbert's was the first book of poetry I ever bought. Countless purchases, and a decade later, it's still the book I reopen on the eventual tired or tormented nights. A few of the poems are instant favorites. For me, many of the others grew slowly over the years, so that, some random night, when the poem finally hit me I felt as if I was holding an entirely new book in my hands. The poetry is largely heavy. But there is a hope, a conviction, a courage, or something warming glancing out that will keep you, too, coming back to old pages. This is a purchase you will not regret.

I recently moved house and had to consider carefully which books to take with me for a time abroad. I'd have to pay for the weight I carried. I eventually took Gilbert as one of my only poets. I also took the short stories of Hawthorne. Both are spare metaphysicians with a sense of humor. I don't go six months without picking up this book and reading something in it. Very few poets can stand up to that kind of revisiting. Bleak humour and refusal to be falsely comforted. An eye for what you may remember at the end of your life.Many of these are poems about women - wives and how he came to leave them, lovers and how they came to die and how he mourned, a young married mother whose baby he threw in the air and murmured PITTSBURGH to in between their trysts. Short, tender, very emotional poems from a man discinclined to easy emotion or postures. Poems to read at difficult junctures in your life and get perspective from. And, finally, poems with a great reach of ambition unusual nowadays in American verse. Poems that claim to talk to God, or at least sit with him for a while on the front porch.

I read this book at the insistance of a professor, and was immediately struck dumb by the sheer power of every poem. Not a word could be added or subtracted anywhere without tarnishing the perfection. For example, one line out of "Adulterated" perfectly conveys the humanity in us all, even in our deities: "There were flowers all around Jesus in his agony at Gethsemene. The Lord sees averything and sees that it is good despite everything." In another poem, "Dante Dancing," he talks of the "absolute love possible only when we are ignorant of each other." I love Ovid, Shakespeare, Whitman, Coleridge ,and many others that stand as the giants of our collective literrary heritage, but If I had to choose one book of poetry that was utterly indispensible, this would be it.

T.S.Eliot once said that many of the most successful writers have published either a lot or very little. Gilbert has chosen the later strategy. Like Cavafy, he has been scrupulous about giving the reader only the very best and most carefully crafted writing from his desk. The result is a small but extremely distinguished body of work that should be remembered as among the best of his generation. Buy this book. Read it closely. The poems will make you strong.

I'm a voracious reader of poetry. I eat and breathe it. So it's rare for a new volume to excite me enough to write an online review such as this. If I can try to pinpoint the genius of his work, it would lie in what he purposely DOESN'T say. It's a book full of grieving, and I find myself grieving with him largely because I'm allowed to experience itÐnot told how to experience. His style harkens back to the ModernistsÐa movement that I wish poetry as a whole would remember. His work demonstrates originality, not in gimicky form or syntax or shock value, but in thought