Gathered in this volume readers will find more than fifty years of poems by the incomparable Jack Gilbert, from his Yale Younger Poets prize-winning volume to glorious late poems, including a section of previously uncollected work.There is no one quite like Jack Gilbert in postwar American poetry. After garnering early acclaim with Views of Jeopardy (1962), he escaped to Europe and lived apart from the literary establishment, honing his uniquely fierce, declarative style, ...

A remarkable late-in-life collection, elegiac and bracing, from master poet Jack Gilbert, whose Refusing Heaven captivated the poetry world and won the National Book Critics Circle Award as well as the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.In these characteristically bold and nuanced poems, Gilbert looks back at the passions of a life—the women, and his memories of all the stages of love; the places (Paris, Greece, Pittsburgh); the mysterious and lonely offices of poetry itself. We...

This is Jack Gilbert's first book since the now-legendary Views of Jeopardy appeared as the 1962 entry in the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Beat poetry was much in vogue at the time, a discursive poetry that rages against things as they are. Perhaps it was for this reason the strict compression of Jack Gilbert's work and its celebration of an ideal of romantic love caused such a sensation. The Times declared him "one of the most exciting voices of the second half of our c...

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 t...

More than a decade after Jack Gilbert’s The Great Fires, this highly anticipated new collection shows the continued development of a poet who has remained fierce in his avoidance of the beaten path. In Refusing Heaven, Gilbert writes compellingly about the commingled passion, loneliness, and sometimes surprising happiness of a life spent in luminous understanding of his own blessings and shortcomings: “The days and nights wasted . . . Long hot afternoons / watching ants w...

**The instant #1 NEW YORK TIMES Bestseller"A must read for anyone hoping to live a creative life... I dare you not to be inspired to be brave, to be free, and to be curious.” —PopSugarFrom the worldwide bestselling author of Eat Pray Love and City of Girls: the path to the vibrant, fulfilling life you’ve dreamed of**.Readers of all ages and walks of life have drawn inspiration and empowerment from Elizabeth Gilbert’s books for years. Now this belov...

**NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the two-term Poet Laureate of the United States Billy Collins comes his first volume of new and selected poems in twelve years.“America’s favorite poet.”—The Wall Street Journal**Aimless Love combines fifty new poems with generous selections from his four most recent books—Nine Horses, The Trouble with Poetry, Ballistics, and Horoscopes for the Dead. Collins’s unmistakable voice, which brings to...

So much of what we live goes on inside—The diaries of grief, the tongue-tied achesOf unacknowledged love are no less realFor having passed unsaid. What we concealIs always more than what we dare confide.Think of the letters that we write our dead.—from “Unsaid”Dana Gioia has long been celebrated as a poet of sharp intelligence and brooding emotion with an ingenious command of his craft. 99 Poems: New & Selected gathers fo...

This selection of poems by Leonard Cohen, one of the most acclaimed singer-songwriters in the world, is accompanied by twenty-four of his striking and provocative drawings.Cohen first made his name as a poet more than half a century ago and since then his achievements in poetry and music have made him an internationally revered figure. These fifteen poems, including “Death of a Lady’s Man,” “On Hearing a Name Long Unspoken,” and “The Embrace,” are drawn from across his remarkable c...

Never afraid to shed the pretense of academic poetry, never shy of letting the power of an image lie in unadorned language, Mary Oliver offers us poems of arresting beauty that reflect on the power of love and the great gifts of the natural world. Inspired by the familiar lines from William Wordsworth, "To me the meanest flower that blows can give / Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears," she uncovers the evidence presented to us daily by nature, in rivers and stones, willows and f...

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry“One of the truly imaginative writers of our time.” —Los Angles Times Book ReviewYou never know what Charles Simic is up to until you reach the end of the line or the bottom of the paragraph. Waiting for you might be a kiss. Or a bludgeon. A smile at the absurdities of society, or a wistful, grim memory of World War II.He puns, pulls pranks. He can be jazzy and streetwise. Or cloak hims...

This collection makes available work of one of our greatest American poets in the last decade of his life. The first section, Pictures from Brueghel, contains previously uncollected short poems, while the second and third parts are the complete texts of The Desert Music (1954) and Journey to Love (1955), originally published by Random House.This collection makes available work of one of our greatest American poets in the last decade of his life. The first section, ...