Refusing Heaven

Author : Jack Gilbert
Publisher : Knopf
ISBN 13 : 0307543943
Total Pages : 112 pages
Book Rating : 4.43/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Refusing Heaven written by Jack Gilbert and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2009-04-02 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 while the cicadas railed / in the Chinese elm about the brevity of life.” Time slows down in these poems, as Gilbert creates an aura of curiosity and wonder at the fact of existence itself. Despite powerful intermittent griefs–over the women he has parted from or the one lost to cancer (an experience he captures with intimate precision)–Gilbert’s choice in this volume is to “refuse heaven.” He prefers this life, with its struggle and alienation and delight, to any paradise. His work is both a rebellious assertion of the call to clarity and a profound affirmation of the world in all its aspects. It braces the reader in its humanity and heart.

Author : Jack Gilbert
Publisher : Knopf
ISBN 13 : 037571085X
Total Pages : 111 pages
Book Rating : 4.58/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Refusing Heaven written by Jack Gilbert and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2007-03-13 with total page 111 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 while the cicadas railed / in the Chinese elm about the brevity of life.” Time slows down in these poems, as Gilbert creates an aura of curiosity and wonder at the fact of existence itself. Despite powerful intermittent griefs–over the women he has parted from or the one lost to cancer (an experience he captures with intimate precision)–Gilbert’s choice in this volume is to “refuse heaven.” He prefers this life, with its struggle and alienation and delight, to any paradise. His work is both a rebellious assertion of the call to clarity and a profound affirmation of the world in all its aspects. It braces the reader in its humanity and heart.

Author : Jack Gilbert
Publisher : Alfred a Knopf Incorporated
ISBN 13 : 1400043654
Total Pages : 112 pages
Book Rating : 4.51/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Refusing Heaven written by Jack Gilbert and published by Alfred a Knopf Incorporated. This book was released on 2005 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new collection of poetry by the critically acclaimed author of Views of Jeopardy, Monolithos, and The Great Fires celebrates the joys and sorrows, wonders and struggles of everyday existence over the potential perfection of any paradise.

Author : Jack Gilbert
Publisher : Knopf
ISBN 13 : 0307760871
Total Pages : 101 pages
Book Rating : 4.76/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Great Fires written by Jack Gilbert and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2013-09-11 with total page 101 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Jack Gilbert
Publisher : Knopf
ISBN 13 : 0375711767
Total Pages : 433 pages
Book Rating : 4.63/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Collected Poems of Jack Gilbert written by Jack Gilbert and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2014-09-02 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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, with its surprising abundance of feeling. He reappeared in our midst with Monolithos (1982) and then went underground again until The Great Fires (1994), which was eventually followed by Refusing Heaven (2005), a prizewinning volume of surpassing joy and sorrow, and the elegiac The Dance Most of All (2009). Whether his subject is his boyhood in working-class Pittsburgh, the women he has loved throughout his life, or the bittersweet losses we all face, Gilbert is by turns subtle and majestic: he steals up on the odd moment of grace; he rises to crescendos of emotion. At every turn, he illuminates the basic joys of everyday experience. Now, for the first time, we have all of Jack Gilbert’s work in one essential volume: testament to a stunning career and to his place at the forefront of poetic achievement in our time.

Author : Jack Gilbert
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780300251616
Total Pages : 61 pages
Book Rating : 4.10/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Views of Jeopardy written by Jack Gilbert and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 61 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection that illuminates everyday experience, Views of Jeopardy is the 58th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets.

Author : Kathleen Alcala
Publisher : Chronicle Books
ISBN 13 : 9780811829533
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.37/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Treasures in Heaven written by Kathleen Alcala and published by Chronicle Books. This book was released on 2000-09 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Estela moves to Mexico City in the late 1800s and meets La Señorita, "what starts as lessons to educate poor children grows into a school for prostitutes, and that soon leads to a controversial all-women orchestra, a radical underground newspaper, and an increasingly dangerous movement for social change that foreshadows the Mexican Revolution."--Jacket.

Author : Jack Gilbert
Publisher : Knopf
ISBN 13 : 0307804364
Total Pages : 81 pages
Book Rating : 4.65/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Dance Most of All written by Jack Gilbert and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2013-09-11 with total page 81 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 get illuminating glimpses of the poet’s background and childhood, in poems like “Going Home” (his mother the daughter of sharecroppers, his father the black sheep in a family of rich Virginia merchants) and “Summer at Blue Creek, North Carolina,” a classic scene of pulling water from the well, sounding the depths. The title of the collection is drawn from the startling “Ovid in Tears,” in which the poet figure has fallen and is carried out, muttering faintly: “White stone in the white sunlight . . . Both the melody / and the symphony. The imperfect dancing / in the beautiful dance. The dance most of all.” Gilbert reminds us that there is beauty to be celebrated in the imperfect—“a worth / to the unshapely our sweet mind founders on”—and at the same time there is “the harrowing by mortality.” Yet, without fail, he embraces the state of grief and loss as part of the dance. The culmination of a career spanning more than half a century of American poetry, The Dance Most of All is a book to celebrate and to read again and again.

Author : Anne Rice
Publisher : Ballantine Books
ISBN 13 : 0345396936
Total Pages : 578 pages
Book Rating : 4.38/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Cry to Heaven written by Anne Rice and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 1995-04-01 with total page 578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a sweeping saga of music and vengeance, the acclaimed author of The Vampire Chronicles draws readers into eighteenth-century Italy, bringing to life the decadence beneath the shimmering surface of Venice, the wild frivolity of Naples, and the magnetic terror of its shadow, Vesuvius. This is the story of the castrati, the exquisite and otherworldly sopranos whose graceful bodies and glorious voices win the adulation of royal courts and grand opera houses throughout Europe. These men are revered as idols—and, at the same time, scorned for all they are not. Praise for Anne Rice and Cry to Heaven “Daring and imaginative . . . [Anne] Rice seems like nothing less than a magician: It is a pure and uncanny talent that can give a voice to monsters and angels both.”—The New York Times Book Review “To read Anne Rice is to become giddy as if spinnning through the mind of time.”—San Francisco Chronicle “If you surrender and go with her . . . you have surrendered to enchantment, as in a voluptuous dream.”—The Boston Globe “Rice is eerily good at making the impossible seem self-evident.”—Time

Author : Jon Krakauer
Publisher : Anchor
ISBN 13 : 1400078997
Total Pages : 434 pages
Book Rating : 4.98/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Under the Banner of Heaven written by Jon Krakauer and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2004-06-08 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the author of Into the Wild and Into Thin Air, this extraordinary work of investigative journalism takes readers inside America’s isolated Mormon Fundamentalist communities. • Now an acclaimed FX limited series streaming on HULU. “Fantastic.... Right up there with In Cold Blood and The Executioner’s Song.” —San Francisco Chronicle Defying both civil authorities and the Mormon establishment in Salt Lake City, the renegade leaders of these Taliban-like theocracies are zealots who answer only to God; some 40,000 people still practice polygamy in these communities. At the core of Krakauer’s book are brothers Ron and Dan Lafferty, who insist they received a commandment from God to kill a blameless woman and her baby girl. Beginning with a meticulously researched account of this appalling double murder, Krakauer constructs a multi-layered, bone-chilling narrative of messianic delusion, polygamy, savage violence, and unyielding faith. Along the way he uncovers a shadowy offshoot of America’s fastest growing religion, and raises provocative questions about the nature of religious belief.