Collected Poems of Jack Gilbert

I had read only a few Gilbert poems before ordering the Collected Poems. My intent was to extend the joy that had evolved with my previous but limited contact. My decision was to read from front to back in the order of the book which is also generally oldest to newer newest. That decision proved disappointing to a fault. The writing early on when Glibert was well into being a mature individual is written as an athletic form of besting, being real smart and using references that are at best obscure save to a very few. Gilbert draws upon the obscure and references that require research. Ok, but some is OK so much is not forme. Showing off his major stints in libraries and mythology and or just the distant and obscure. Ok I got it, he is smart and has vast information. That seldom extended emotions until well rsearched. While each of those early reads when investigated offered exceptional insights and once disected and noted were a good read my intentions in exploring Gilbert were not in extending my classic and or liberal arts education of some 40 plus years past by researching each writing. Giving up however would not have been a bad thing at that point but I advanced through the pages and sought writings of the modern Gilbert and in his age and comparability to my own age life and his insights returned me to the first joy of sharing Gilbert. The books second half and last one third embraced me again and now I can return to the early writing and enjoy it in sips and flip forward to gulp the newer fully embracing the differences. In Flying: The crash takes place after the success and triumph. Powerful good. Thank You.

I greeted the publication of Gilbert's Collected Poems with a gallon of joy and two drops of sadness. I was saddened by Gilbert's death, and was a bit downcast to find what I'd long suspected-- that each poem Gilbert writes is often the same poem he's always been writing. That said, I would echo Faulkner and say that that one poem Gilbert is always writing is worth any number of little old ladies (though since Gilbert so clearly adores women-- young, old, mature, beautiful, ugly, talkative, silent-- perhaps we ought to change it to 'crotchety old men'?). Declarative sentences shorn of modifiers are his trade. Sentence fragments like ruins, sharp-edged and loss-ridden. Less Stoic than Epicurean, Gilbert finds aestheticism in his asceticism: imagine St. Jerome evoking the desert wastes with the same love of the senses as Robert Herrick. Gilbert's poetry was for so long a closely kept secret that it's a pity he is readily available for everyone; as Auden wrote of Yeats:Now he is scattered among a hundred citiesAnd wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,To find his happiness in another kind of woodAnd be punished under a foreign code of conscience.The words of a dead manAre modified in the guts of the living.But I am happy to let others taste his vintage, so long as I, greedy reader that I am, get a cup of it all for myself. And that's what this book will be, now and forever: a vintage tasting of dry stones and hard light.

Yeah, I said it: the greatest book of poetry ever written. It stands on its own. If you try to compare it to the masters of the past it simply climbs their corpses and stands on top, even higher than before.There is great simplicity of language (at least in the later years) that presents a very profound and coherent vision of the poet’s life. Jack Gilbert’s particular life, imagined as a mythology.The yearning for something important, the seeking for grandeur among the ruins, the passion and undeniable lusts, the richness within poverty...

Mr. Gilbert's work speaks for itself; the good, the bad, and the beautiful---Not all poems speak to all people, nor should they have to---If you can appreciate what's written here, be welcome; if not, feel free to look somewhere else....This is a book any real poetry lover ( or really any human being ) should own, and more importantly, should read.

Jack Gilbert has long been one of my favorite contemporary poets. The clarity and directness of his syntax and word choice, the feel of the Mediterranean landscape where he lived much of his adult life and his concern with the basic questions of meaning, loss, love and sex, and how to live with joy in a painful world all make him one of our best. This collection allows the reader to see continuity and progress in his writing. Although I like his later writing the best, the whole collection allows the reader to see how he got there. I am glad to have his work gathered in one volume with a hard cover that will last longer than my paper back versions of his original individual books. If you like the poetry of Philip Levine, W.S. Merwin, Gary Snyder, Galway Kinnell and, for that matter, Robert Frost, take a look at Jack Gilbert's life work between these covers.

Jack Gilbert's Collected Poems are so very rich that individual poems almost have to be read with a certain amount of space between them. They shock with their juxtapositions of the lyrical and prosaic. But in the end the brilliance overcomes the petty faults that derail us for a few seconds. The poems bounce us back and forth between the metaphoric, surreal, philosophical, and the biograpical. The syntax and punctuation are strange, phrases sometimes being punctuated as sentences. The object at the end of one sentence often becomes the subject at the beginning of another, with or without a period separating them. There is an insinuating pleasure in these poems as we sometimes read them one way and then another. One feels as if something important is being said, that a very rich life has been explored and left at the reader's disposal, who is very happy for this gift.If you enjoy the poetry of Wallace Stevens or Clarles Simic you might very well enjoy Jack Gilbert.

Not my taste in poetry - it was downloaded in error and I cannot delete it. An expensive error. There should be a way of doing this.

A stellar compilation of the works of a recent master of the written word. Accessible yet deep.

Torn and mutilated book

good collection

Beautiful.