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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

List Appertaining To Books The Great Fires

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

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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.

 

Rating Appertaining To Books The Great Fires

Ratings: 4.34 From 2083 Users | 127 Reviews

Commentary Appertaining To Books The Great Fires

It slowly dawned on me that I somehow went through far too many years of BFA poetry workshops without learning my lesson - I always assume poems are fictional. It's always uncomfortable when I realize someone's beautiful, earnest poems are actually grounded in their real life because then I know far too much about them and, like, we don't know each other well for us to get embarrassingly personal, dude. That dead wife? Real dead wife. Which, man.But FUCK can Jack Gilbert write. The absolute

Um, holy shit, Jack Gilbert.

I wanted to read this book b/c it was one of Mike Rugnetta's favourites, and there is definitely something here, some kind of tenderness. The parts about his wife's death are interesting, but I'm afraid I've had enough of sad, stoic men living on mountains trying to sell me the simple life and lyricizing their sexual conquests. On top of that, he seems uncomfortably comfortable sexualizing young girls and uncritical of positive associations to whiteness. There were a couple other memorable



Once again I'm at a loss for words when I try to write about poetry. I can't pretend I really know enough about the technical side of writing poetry, to write an informed review, and can merely give my personal opinion. Most of the time the poems felt too full. Not necessarily too long, but rather as if the writer couldn't quite get at the point he wanted to make, and just tried to throw more words on the page in an attempt to reach the centre of a feeling, and then left it like that. It never

A curious thing about Gilbert is that for all his enormous cunning, toward his intellect, alas, skepticism remains a reader's best procedure. "The Spirit and the Soul" -- reading that poem, it's as if he doesn't get that these are heavy literary terms, and his minding them will only focus us on his self-mythologizing lexicon, his speaker's "insistence" -- a crucial word throughout -- on what "in the heart lasts". Idioms, as idioms, a way of saying said over and over again -- Gilbert's own

Well goddamn.