{"product_id":"the-great-fires-isbn-9780679747673","title":"The Great Fires","description":"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. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe \"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. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Jack Gilbert was born in Pittsburgh. He has published \u003ci\u003eViews of Jeopardy\u003c\/i\u003e, the 1962 winner of the Yale Younger Poets Series, and \u003ci\u003eMonolithos\u003c\/i\u003e. Both books were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. A third volume, elegiac poems, was bought out, in a limited edition, under the title \u003ci\u003eKochan\u003c\/i\u003e. Mr. Gilbert has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.\u003cb\u003eMeasuring the Tyger\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBarrels of chains. Sides of beef stacked in vans.\u003cbr\u003eWater buffalo dragging logs of teak in the river mud\u003cbr\u003eoutside Mandalay. Pantocrater in the Byzantium dome.\u003cbr\u003eThe mammoth overhead crane bringing slabs of steel\u003cbr\u003ethrough the dingy light and roar to the giant shear\u003cbr\u003ethat cuts the adamantine three-quarter-inch plates\u003cbr\u003eand they flop down. The weight of the mind fractures\u003cbr\u003ethe girders and piers of the spirit, spilling out\u003cbr\u003ethe heart's melt. Incandescent ingots big as cars\u003cbr\u003etrundling out of titanic mills, red slag scaling off\u003cbr\u003ethe brighter metal in the dark. The Monongahela River\u003cbr\u003ebelow, night's sheen its belly. Silence except\u003cbr\u003efor the machinery clanging deeper in us. You will\u003cbr\u003elove again, people say. Give it time. Me with time\u003cbr\u003erunning out. Day after day of the everyday.\u003cbr\u003eWhat they call real life, made of eighth-inch gauge.\u003cbr\u003eNewness strutting around as if it were significant.\u003cbr\u003eIrony, neatness and rhyme pretending to be poetry.\u003cbr\u003eI want to go back to that time after Michiko's death\u003cbr\u003ewhen I cried every day among the trees. To the real.\u003cbr\u003eTo the magnitude of pain, of being that much alive.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTo See If Something Comes Next\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThere is nothing here at the top of the valley.\u003cbr\u003eSky and morning, silence and the dry smell\u003cbr\u003eof heavy sunlight on the stone everywhere.\u003cbr\u003eGoats occasionally, and the sound of roosters\u003cbr\u003ein the bright heat where he lives with the dead\u003cbr\u003ewoman and purity. Trying to see if something\u003cbr\u003ecomes next. Wondering whether he has stalled.\u003cbr\u003eMaybe, he thinks, it is like the Noh: whenever\u003cbr\u003ethe script says dances, whatever the actor does next\u003cbr\u003eis a dance. If he stands still, he is dancing.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eScheming in the Snow\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThere is a time after what comes after\u003cbr\u003ebeing young, and a time after that, he thinks\u003cbr\u003ehappily as he walks through the winter woods,\u003cbr\u003ehearing in silence a woodpecker far off.\u003cbr\u003eRemembering his Chinese friend\u003cbr\u003ewhose brother gave her a jade ring from\u003cbr\u003ethe Han Dynasty when she turned eighteen.\u003cbr\u003eTwo weeks later, when she was hurrying up\u003cbr\u003ethe steps of a Hong Kong bridge, she fell,\u003cbr\u003eand the thousand-year-old ring shattered\u003cbr\u003eon the concrete. When she told him, stunned\u003cbr\u003eand tears running down her face, he said,\u003cbr\u003e\"Don't cry. I'll get you something better.\"","brand":"Knopf","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46304663044325,"sku":"NP9780679747673","price":19.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780679747673.jpg?v=1767739630","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/the-great-fires-isbn-9780679747673","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}