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Original Title:	The Great Fires: Poems, 1982-1992
ISBN:	0679747672 (ISBN13: 9780679747673)
Edition Language:	English

The Great Fires

Jack Gilbert

Paperback | Pages: 96 pages

Rating: 4.34 | 2083 Users | 127 Reviews

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Title	:	The Great Fires
Author	:	Jack Gilbert
Book Format	:	Paperback
Book Edition	:	Anniversary Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 96 pages
Published	:	February 13th 1996 by Knopf (first published February 13th 1994)
Categories	:	Poetry. Fiction

Description Toward Books The Great Fires

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.  

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Ratings: 4.34 From 2083 Users | 127 Reviews

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If you are the type of poetry fan that enjoys a good collection of despair, this might be just the thing for you. It was much too dark for me, and full of a self-pity that I could not stomach. I found myself cringing every time I picked the book up to try and muscle through one more poem, and it caused me such regret that I eventually threw the darn thing out.

Spurred on by a glowing review (What is the best portrayal of a marriage in literature?), I turned back to Gilbert's The Great Fires and have been savoring this collection for weeks now.In a word, every poem in this collection is piercing, most often conveying the searing ache of loss, and the ache of loss lostthe horror of discovering that the pain of the one great loss that has defined a period of his life is no longer so clear as it once was. ("I want to go back to that time after Michiko's

Jack Gilbert is the quintessential Jack of poetry, a man's man but God! I love him. A tender, insightful, powerful writer he conforms to no standards; neither wild nor docile, Gilbert beats to his own heart and it speaks volumes. He is possibly this century's most severely overlooked poet. While other less than stellar poets dominate the skies, Gilbert is the comet streaking across the great fires. His strength lies in his narrative poems and the romantic interlude between words are spare but

Glittering, unsparing work. Beautiful.

Of course it was a disaster.The unbearable, dearest secrethas always been a disaster.The danger when we try to leave.Going over and over afterwardwhat we should have doneinstead of what we did.But for those short timeswe seemed to be alive. Misled,misused, lied to and cheated,certainly. Still, for thatlittle while, we visitedour possible life.

I cannot find another poet like Gilbert. Most of his poems, at least in this book, carry with them a quiet feeling of isolation- a bitter-sweet feeling of nostalgia that both bites and repairs the heart. It's difficult to know how to feel when reading his poems, but one thing is for certain; you will feel.

Two of Jack Gilbert's poems, "Finding Something" and "Michiko Dead" appear in "The Poet's Companion" by Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux, as examples of how to use metaphor in writing poetry. These two poems impressed me so much that for a long time I wanted to read more of Gilbert's work, hence I was excited to find this collection. Gilbert's use of language is surprising, direct, and reaches an astonishing depth. Sometimes the poems seem to wander a bit, making them difficult to understand