The Great Fires : Poems, 1982-1992

Rating:
Summary: Simply wonderful
Review: I have both Monolithos and the Great Fires. I remember and reread poems from both these volumes, continuously. Not all the poems, for me, are memorable, but many are. This is much much better than average for most poetry books by the typically annointed "major" poets. Gilbert takes care and time to read, his words are set in, play out through space and silence. The grief and loss he expresses are not the point for me, most poetry is about this, but he implicates his own sentimentality. And I like the "form factor" of his poems, the line breaks, line lengths, etc. And finally, I like the way he approaches his "career" which seems, to be an "un-career." Very little self-promotion, conference hopping, log rolling, etc.

Rating:
Summary: A Poet to Keep on The Narrowest Bookshelf
Review: I recently moved house and had to consider carefully which books to take with me for a time abroad. I'd have to pay for the weight I carried. I eventually took Gilbert as one of my only poets. I also took the short stories of Hawthorne. Both are spare metaphysicians with a sense of humor. I don't go six months without picking up this book and reading something in it. Very few poets can stand up to that kind of revisiting. Bleak humour and refusal to be falsely comforted. An eye for what you may remember at the end of your life.

Many of these are poems about women - wives and how he came to leave them, lovers and how they came to die and how he mourned, a young married mother whose baby he threw in the air and murmured PITTSBURGH to in between their trysts. Short, tender, very emotional poems from a man discinclined to easy emotion or postures. Poems to read at difficult junctures in your life and get perspective from. And, finally, poems with a great reach of ambition unusual nowadays in American verse. Poems that claim to talk to God, or at least sit with him for a while on the front porch.

Rating:
Summary: Good, but not great
Review: Jack Gilbert has penned many fine poems, but his range is limited, and he is a bit more showy and tenacious than deep. I too come away feeling like I am hearing the same poem over and over. Ezra Pound he ain't. I can understand why many might like his work, but really now, a "national treasure"?

There are stronger poets, more fierce, more profound, and brighter by far.

Rating:
Summary: Haunting and exquisite
Review: Jack Gilbert is not a genius by any stretch, nor is he a major poet.

Much of his work is pretty fanciful, and his ego idealized. He is a notoriously poor critic, given to puffery and easy to agree with (but not very substantia) pronouncements. One gets the feeling that he tends to assume that something is so simply because it is what he beilieves.

He is nevertheless a talented lyric poet, and his poems about Michiko Nogami, his late wife and great muse, are well worth reading. How many poets will go to their grave having written even one poem worth rereading? He has at least a dozen, and that's doing damned well in my book. It is interesting that although he often booms on about being large, his poems succeed best when they are less self-conscious, willing to be small. This is where his work becomes becomes real.

Readers might take note that Gilbert originally published his Michiko poems these poems in a limited edition called "Kochan", a small collection that included work by the lady herself.

Take what is good in his work, and smile gently at the author's indulgences. This is still a book worth reading.

Rating:
Summary: wow
Review: Jack Gilbert knows how to write poetry. Pompous and arrogant? Maybe, but what, may I ask, is wrong with being arrogant enough to publish a fine, slender volume of your own work over an entire decade, where many contemporary writers would have published 3 or 4 books of poems in the same amount of time, much of it little more than filler to flesh out a book of "poems"? Arrogant indeed...

Rating:
Summary: Gilbert's work will endure.
Review: T.S.Eliot once said that many of the most successful writers have published either a lot or very little. Gilbert has chosen the later strategy. Like Cavafy, he has been scrupulous about giving the reader only the very best and most carefully crafted writing from his desk. The result is a small but extremely distinguished body of work that should be remembered as among the best of his generation. Buy this book. Read it closely. The poems will make you strong.

Rating:
Summary: Haunting and exquisite
Review: These poems give and give. Incredible titles. Compelling, unflinching and deeply thoughtful. Beautiful phrasing, structure. A poet's poet, everyone's poet. An antidote to the rush, noise and information clutter of daily life. A must have.