Read Collected Poems Online

Authors: Jack Gilbert

Collected Poems

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright © 2012 by Jack Gilbert

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada, Limited, Toronto.

www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Poems in this collection originally appeared in the following works:
Views of Jeopardy,
copyright © 1962 by Yale University Press (Yale University Press, 1962);
Monolithos,
copyright © 1963, 1965, 1966, 1977, 1979, 1980, 1981, 1982 by Jack Gilbert (Alfred A. Knopf, 1982);
The Great Fires,
copyright © 1994 by Jack Gilbert (Alfred A. Knopf, 1994);
Refusing Heaven,
copyright © 2005 by Jack Gilbert (Alfred A. Knopf, 2005); and
The Dance Most of All,
copyright © 2009 by Jack Gilbert (Alfred A. Knopf, 2009).

Poems collected here for the first time were originally published in the following publications:

The Kenyon Review:
“Secrets of Poetry”;
The New Republic:
“Spring”;
The New Yorker:
“Convalescing.”

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gilbert, Jack, [date]
[Poems, Selections]
Collected poems / by Jack Gilbert.—1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-96074-0
I. Title.
PS3557.I34217A6 2012
811’.54—dc23
2011025743

Cover image:
Jack, 1960,
woodcut by
Gianna Gelmetti (1937–2010)
Cover design by Abby Weintraub

v3.1_r1

For Gianna Gelmetti, Michiko Nogami, and Linda Gregg

CONTENTS

     
In Dispraise of Poetry

     
Perspective He Would Mutter Going to Bed

     
Elephants

     
And She Waiting

     
It May Be No One Should Be Opened

     
House on the California Mountain

     
Myself Considered as the Monster in the Foreground

     
In Perugino We Have Sometimes Seen Our Country

     
A Poem for the Fin Du Monde Man

     
Rain

     
County Musician

     
Malvolio in San Francisco

     
Orpheus in Greenwich Village

     
Don Giovanni on His Way to Hell

     
Don Giovanni on His Way to Hell (II)

     
Before Morning in Perugia

     
Midnight Is Made of Bricks

     
The Night Comes Every Day to My Window

     
Meelee’s Away

     
The Abnormal Is Not Courage

     
Lions

     
Susanna and the Elders

     
The Four Perfectly Tangerines

     
The First Morning of the World on Long Island

     
I’ll Try to Explain About the Fear

     
Poem for Laura

     
New York, Summer

     
The Bay Bridge from Potrero Hill

     
On Growing Old in San Francisco

     
Without Watteau, Without Burckhardt, Oklahoma

     
Letter to Mr. John Keats

     
Portolano

     
It Is Clear Why the Angels Come No More

     
The Whiteness, the Sound, and Alcibiades

     
Between Poems

     
The Plundering of Circe

     
Islands and Figs

     
Poetry Is a Kind of Lying

     
For Example

     
The Sirens Again

     
Alba

     
Ostinato rigore

     
A Bird Sings to Establish Frontiers

     
Bartleby at the Wall

     
All the Way from There to Here

     
Not Part of Literature

     
Trying to Be Married

     
Registration

     
More Than Friends

     
That Tenor of Which the Night Birds Are a Vehicle

     
Walking Home Across the Island

     
Mistrust of Bronze

     
Angelus

     
A Kind of World

     
Leaving Monolithos

     
Divorce

     
Remembering My Wife

     
Pewter

     
Night After Night

     
Hunger

     
Sects

     
They Call It Attempted Suicide

     
Meniscus

     
Who’s There

     
Meaning Well

     
Template

     
Siege

     
Translation into the Original

     
Burning and Fathering: Accounts of My Country

     
The Fashionable Heart

     
Breakfast

     
Losing

     
The Rainy Forests of Northern California

     
Il mio tesoro

     
Don Giovanni in Trouble

     
The Movies

     
Byzantium Burning

     
They Will Put My Body into the Ground

     
Love Poem

     
Elephant Hunt in Guadalajara

     
Pavane

     
Loyalty

     
Song

     
Getting Ready

     
Sul ponticello

     
The Cucumbers of Praxilla of Sicyon

     
A Description of Happiness in København

     
New Hampshire Marble

     
My Marriage with Mrs. Johnson

     
Heart Skidding

     
Games

     
My Graveyard in Tokyo

     
Alone on Christmas Eve in Japan

     
Textures

     
The Revolution

     
Mexico

     
Another Grandfather

     
Singing in My Difficult Mountains

     
Threshing the Fire

     
Going Wrong

     
Guilty

     
The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart

     
Lovers

     
Measuring the Tyger

     
Voices Inside and Out

     
Tear It Down

     
Dante Dancing

     
The Great Fires

     
Finding Something

     
Prospero Without His Magic

     
Finding Eurydice

     
Going There

     
Haunted Importantly

     
Searching for Pittsburgh

     
Married

     
Explicating the Twilight

     
Steel Guitars

     
Recovering amid the Farms

     
The Spirit and the Soul

     
To See If Something Comes Next

     
A Stubborn Ode

     
Scheming in the Snow

     
Ruins and Wabi

     
Betrothed

     
Trying to Have Something Left Over

     
On Stone

     
Relative Pitch

     
1953

     
Alone

     
Adulterated

     
What Is There to Say?

     
Prospero Dreams of Arnaut Daniel Inventing Love in the Twelfth Century

     
Tasters for the Lord

     
Carrying Torches at Noon

     
A Year Later

     
Looking Away from Longing

     
Factoring

     
The Milk of Paradise

     
Gift Horses

     
Hard Wired

     
The White Heart of God

     
Michiko Nogami (1946–1982)

     
The Container for the Thing Contained

     
Moment of Grace

     
The Lord Sits with Me Out in Front

     
Between Aging and Old

     
The History of Men

     
Older Women

     
Exceeding

     
Infidelity

     
Highlights and Interstices

     
Peaches

     
Music Is the Memory of What Never Happened

     
Alternatives

     
Michiko Dead

     
Ghosts

     
Harm and Boon in the Meetings

     
Man at a Window

     
Sonatina

     
Foraging for Wood on the Mountain

     
In Umbria

     
Conceiving Himself

     
Chastity

     
Me and Capablanca

     
A Ghost Sings, a Door Opens

     
I Imagine the Gods

     
Thinking About Ecstasy

     
Night Songs and Day Songs

     
Eating with the Emperor

     
Playing House

     
Beyond Beginnings

     
Theoretical Lives

     
From These Nettles, Alms

     
Hot Nights in Florida

     
Getting It All

     
The Edge of the World

     
Leporello on Don Giovanni

     
First Times

     
Half the Truth

     
Respect

     
The Lives of Famous Men

     
Getting Old

     
How to Love the Dead

     
Almost Happy

     
A Brief for the Defense

     
Naked Except for the Jewelry

     
Put Her in the Fields for Kindness

     
What Song Should We Sing

     
Having the Having

     
Say You Love Me

     
Kunstkammer

     
Halloween

     
Elegy for Bob (Jean McLean)

     
Résumé

     
More than Sixty

     
By Small and Small: Midnight to Four A.M.

     
Once upon a Time

     
A Close Call

     
The Rooster

     
Failing and Flying

     
Burning (Andante non troppo)

     
The Other Perfection

     
A Ball of Something

     
Getting Away with It

     
Truth

     
Transgressions

     
The Abandoned Valley

     
Happening Apart from What’s Happening Around It

     
Exceeding the Spirit

     
Meditation Eleven: Reading Blake Again

     
How Much of That Is Left in Me?

     
’Tis Here! ’Tis Here! ’Tis Gone! (The Nature of Presence)

     
Ambition

     
Being Young Back Then

     
Not Getting Closer

     
Adults

Other books

Ceremony of the Innocent by Taylor Caldwell
Gluttony: A Dictionary for the Indulgent by Adams Media Corporation
On the Verge by Garen Glazier
Anything Could Happen by B.G. Thomas
Otherland by Shampine, Almondie
Glorious Angel by Johanna Lindsey
Ivy Lane: Autumn: by Cathy Bramley
Protector of the Flight by Robin D. Owens


readsbookonline.com Copyright 2016 - 2024