Refusing Heaven

English

ISBN: 1400043654

EAN: 9781400043651

Category: Poetry / General

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

Release Date: 03/08/2005

Synopsis: More than a decade after Jack GilbertsThe 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 griefsover the women he has parted from or the one lost to cancer (an experience he captures with intimate precision)Gilberts 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.

Awards: Los Angeles Times Book Prizes – null  Los Angeles Times Book Prizes – null 

Excerpt: Unknown Property Excerpt

Refusing Heaven

Illustrated: No

Format: Hardcover

Height: 0.63 inches

Width: 6.05 inches

Length: 8.69 inches

Weight: 11.15 oz

Pages: 112