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The Dance Most of All : Poems
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The Dance Most of All : Poems Hardcover - 2009

by Gilbert, Jack

  • Used

Description

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Used - Good. Used book that is in clean, average condition without any missing pages.
Used - Good
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Details

  • Title The Dance Most of All : Poems
  • Author Gilbert, Jack
  • Binding Hardcover
  • Edition First Edition
  • Condition Used - Good
  • Pages 60
  • Volumes 1
  • Language ENG
  • Publisher Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, New York:
  • Date 2009-04-07
  • Bookseller's Inventory # 5057455-6
  • ISBN 9780307270764 / 0307270769
  • Weight 0.56 lbs (0.25 kg)
  • Dimensions 8.62 x 6.3 x 0.5 in (21.89 x 16.00 x 1.27 cm)
  • Library of Congress Catalog Number 2008044670
  • Dewey Decimal Code 811.54

From the publisher

Jack Gilbert was born in Pittsburgh. He is the author of The Great Fires: Poems 1982–1992; Monolithos, which was short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize; Views of Jeopardy, the 1962 winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize; and Refusing Heaven. He lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Categories

Excerpt

THE SPELL CAST OVERIn the old days we could see nakedness onlyin the burlesque houses. In the lavishtheaters left over from vaudeville,ruined in the Great Depression. What had beengrand gestures of huge chandeliersand mythic heroes courting the goddesson the ceiling. Now the chandeliers were grimyand the ceilings hanging in tatters. It waslike the Russian aristocrats fleeingthe Revolution. Ending up as taxi driversin Paris dressed in their worn-out elegance.It was like that in the Pittsburgh of my days.Old men of shabby clothes in the emptyseats at the Roxy Theater dreamingof the sumptuous headlinersslowly discarding layers of theirlavish gowns. Baring the secretbeauty to the men of their season.The old men came from their one room(with its single, forbidden gas range)to watch the strippers.To remember what usedto be. Like the gray-haired men of Iliumwho waited each morning for Helento cross over to the temple in her light raiment.The waning men longed to escape from the spellcast over them by time.To escape the imprisonedlonging.To insist on dispensation.To seetheir young hearts just one more time.Those famous women like honeycombs.Women movingto the old music again. That former grace of flesh.The sheen of them in the sunlight, to watchthem walking by the sea.SOUTHIn the small towns along the rivernothing happens day after long day.Summer weeks stalled forever,and long marriages always the same.Lives with only emergencies, births,and fishing for excitement. Then a shipcomes out of the mist. Or comes aroundthe bend carefully one morningin the rain, past the pines and shrubs.Arrives on a hot fragrant night,grandly, all lit up. Gone two dayslater, leaving fury in its wake.For Susan Crosby Lawrence AndersonCHERISHING WHAT ISN'TAh, you three women whom I have loved in thislong life, along with the few others.And the four I may have loved, or stopped shortof loving. I wander through these woodsmaking songs of you. Some of regret, someof longing, and a terrible one of death.I carry the privacy of your bodiesand hearts in me. The shameful ardorand the shameless intimacy, the secret kindsof happiness and the walled-up childhoods.I carol loudly of you among trees emptiedof winter and rejoice quietly in summer.A score of women if you count love both largeand small, real ones that were briefand those that lasted. Gentle love and somealmost like an animal with its prey.What is left is what’s alive in me. The failingof your beauty and its remaining.You are like countries in which my lovetook place. Like a bell in the treesthat makes your music in each wind that moves.A music composed of what you have forgotten.That will end with my ending.

Media reviews

“These poems are deeply elegiac, looking back over a long life lived in the various modes one comes to associate with Gilbert: desire, love, longing, and happiness . . . For Gilbert, these poems suggest a satisfaction and peace with all he has done. For the rest of us, we may take Gilbert’s final work as a guide.” —The Oregonian

“The best poems here are valuable bulletins from a distant, private war fought over resources for affirmation, in which the most precious weapon is the capacity to ‘say grace over / almost everything.’” —Poetry


From the Trade Paperback edition.

About the author

Jack Gilbert was born in Pittsburgh. He is the author of "The Great Fires: Poems 1982 1992; Monolithos," which was short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize; "Views of Jeopardy," the 1962 winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize; and "Refusing Heaven." He lives in Northampton, Massachusetts."