Trangressions

Jack Gilbert was a major figure in American poetry, but was always a total outsider, defiantly unfashionable and publishing only four books in five decades. Initially associated with the Beats, he left America after winning the Yale Younger Poets Prize with Views of Jeopardy in 1962, eking out a living for many years on Greek islands. His second collection, Monolithos, appeared twenty years later in 1982, but he made his strongest impression on American readers with two later collections, The Great Fires (1994) and Refusing Heaven (2005), winner of the prestigious National Book Critics Circle Award. His final collection The Dance Most of All (2009) was followed by his Collected Poems from Knopf in 2012. Transgressions was his only UK publication, and covers his collections from Views of Jeopardy to Refusing Heaven. Jack Gilbert wrote compellingly about passion, loss and loneliness. His poems are ?lled with a sense of wonder at existence and with his surprise at ?nding happiness – despite grief, struggle and alienation – in a life spent in luminous understanding of his own blessings and shortcomings. His work is both a rebellious assertion of clarity and a profound affirmation of the world in all its aspects. His poems are about being alive: the nature of the self, the life he lived and the people he loved.

Jack Gilbert (1925-2012) was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He was educated in Pittsburgh and San Francisco, where he later participated in Jack Spicer’s famous ‘Poetry as Magic’ Workshop at San Francisco State College in 1957. Initially associated with the Beats, he left America after winning the Yale Younger Poets Prize with Views of Jeopardy in 1962, eking out a living for many years on Greek islands, most notably Paros. His second collection, Monolithos, appeared twenty years later in 1982, winning him the Stanley Kunitz Prize and the American Poetry Review Prize, but he made his strongest impression on American readers with two later collections, The Great Fires (1994) and Refusing Heaven (2005), winner of the prestigious National Book Critics Circle Award. His final collection, The Dance Most of All (2009), was followed by his Collected Poems from Knopf in 2012. Monolithos (1982) and Refusing Heaven (2005) were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and Refusing Heaven was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His other honours included a Lannan Literary Award and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. His only UK edition, Transgressions: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2006), covers his collections from Views of Jeopardy to Refusing Heaven. Gilbert was the 1999-2000 Grace Hazard Conkling writer-in-residence at Smith College and a visiting professor and writer-in-residence at the University of Tennessee in 2004.