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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

Details Regarding Books The Great Fires

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

Commentary Concering 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.

 

Rating Regarding Books The Great Fires

Ratings: 4.34 From 2083 Users | 127 Reviews

Assessment Regarding Books The Great Fires

I was out in the woods yesterday with some friends, and we were staring at some beautifully almost-symmetric rocks in a creek bed. We started talking about wabi-sabi, which reminded me of the poem "Ruins and Wabi" from this book. That poem reminded me of several other poems in this book, which reminded me that this book is unbearably awesome.Four years after first reading it this is still my favorite book of poetry, hands down.

I've only lately come to Gilbert's poetry. With each book, though, I'm increasingly appreciative of his quiet power. The poems in The Great Fires, even more so than others I've read, are about intense feeling. In that way they have an Asian sensibility about them, like the focused emotion of Japanese novels. Each of these poems examines such a mood or expressed feeling. Sadness seems to permeate them, and loss--Gilbert mentions several times Michiko, the young wife who died very young. Even the

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

Glittering, unsparing work. Beautiful.

Gilbert is a master of poetics, but it seems to me he wasn't a very nice person. Many of his poems are misogynist, full of a very arrogant male gaze (see "Steel Guitars," "The Milk of Paradise," "The Container for the Thing Contained," "In Umbria"). It's as if he genuinely believed all women were there simply for him to admire as objects. Very disturbing.I also felt like most of these poems were full of pining, which I found annoying. He didn't feel grounded in reality. It was like he was

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

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.